Joseph Banks and Charles Blagden: cultures of advancement in the scientific worlds of late eighteenth-century London and Paris

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and Charles Blagden, secretary to Banks and the Society between 1784 and 1797. Blagden is often referred to as one of Banks's key assistants, as a trusted adviser, collaborator and source of information. Yet, despite his significance, the nature of Blagden's association with Banks has not been explored in detail. This paper traces the development of their sometimes tumultuous relationship, exposing it as one in which Blagden, an aspiring gentleman, sought Banks's patronage to further his career and social ambitions. Key to Blagden's strategy was his role as a source of information for Banks from Paris. Yet, while Blagden pursued patronage with Banks in London, on visits to Paris he encountered a situation where merit, in terms of published scientific outputs, determined one's membership of the scientific community. Exploration of these conflicting cultures of advancement—patronage versus advancement through merit—here informs a re-assessment of scientific exchange at a key moment in Blagden's career, the 1783 ‘water controversy’. The limitations of Banks's patronage for ambitious clients are also explored, in the context of a rupture in the relationship between Blagden and Banks at the end of the 1780s.

Introduction

Charles Blagden, originally trained as a physician, served as secretary to the Royal Society for 13 years under its longest-serving president, Joseph Banks. Where scholars have described Banks as a natural philosophical patron, the ‘autocrat of the philosophers’, and a ‘centre of calculation’, Blagden has appeared on the periphery, as a significant yet little-studied assistant.¹ John Gascoigne has described Blagden as Banks's ‘scientific lieutenant’, while Iain Watts has referred to him as Banks's ‘longtime friend and supporter’ and fellow member of the ‘elder statesmen of the British scientific community’.² Blagden is often referred to in such terms, yet scholars have not explored how and why he cultivated this position as Banks's assistant. This paper reveals a new perspective on Banks, by tracing the development of his relationship with Blagden in the context of information exchange between London and Paris at the end of the eighteenth century.

Coming from a relatively obscure provincial background, Blagden's aims from the beginning of his career centred on obtaining social status and prestige.³ In furthering these ambitions, Banks's friendship and support was key. Shortly after graduating MD from the University of Edinburgh, Blagden cultivated Banks as a patron, in an attempt to foster his identity as a man of science among the gentlemanly circles of late eighteenth-century London.⁴ The pursuit of patronage in achieving advancement in the natural philosophical world is perhaps more closely associated with earlier centuries of the early modern period. James Delbourgo and Alice Marples have highlighted the patronage networks of the seventeenth-century collector and Royal Society president Hans Sloane, through which ambitious naturalists fashioned their own careers by fostering attachments through gifts of knowledge and objects.⁵ Despite this association with earlier periods, Blagden pursued a similar style of patronage with Banks at the end of the eighteenth century, marshalling gifts and favours in exchange for rewards in social standing.

Key to Blagden's efforts to win patronage was his role as Banks's conduit for information between London and Paris. Banks is often described as a champion for maintaining contact with French savants despite recurrent conflict in the late eighteenth century.⁶ Iain Watts, Danielle Fauque and Elise Lipkowitz have traced the ways in which Blagden operated as a source of information concerning French affairs in light of his frequent visits to the Continent.⁷ Though such scholarship has drawn attention to cross-channel communication and Blagden's role within it, scholars have not explored these exchanges in the context of his relationship with Banks. In the late eighteenth century, patronage as a strategy for advancement in the natural philosophical world was increasingly being challenged by more meritocratic solutions. As Ken Alder has shown, in his study of French engineers at the end of the eighteenth century, cultures of meritocracy that judged and ranked individuals based on their intellectual outputs, using processes applied to their object of study, particularly mathematics, were appealed to in order to legitimate advancement at scientific institutions in France, such as the École Militaire.⁸

At a key moment in Blagden's career, cultures of advancement, in the form of strategies for succeeding in social and scientific circles, clashed against one another, with consequences for Blagden and Banks's relationship with the Académie des Sciences in Paris.⁹ On Blagden's first visit to Paris, in 1783, he encountered French savants who considered publication, rather than patronage, as the principal indicator of one's value within the scientific community. During this visit, a priority dispute, known as the ‘water controversy’, erupted between the British chemists, Henry Cavendish and James Watt, and the French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, concerning who had first discovered the composition of water.¹⁰ Blagden became embroiled in the dispute as a broker of information, his actions during the controversy being either vilified or excused.¹¹ While Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach have argued that the controversy resulted from ‘the casual way scientific information was communicated’, this paper proposes a re-assessment of the controversy, as an instance where differing cultures of advancement at the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences came into conflict.¹²

This paper provides a new perspective on Banks's role as a patron, and the differing characters of natural philosophical communities in Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century. The paper begins by examining the development of Blagden and Banks's early relationship, built around the exchange of information, objects and rewards in a patronage system. The next section explores the conflict Blagden experienced between alternative cultures of advancement in the 1780s, when he represented both himself and Banks during a series of fraught exchanges with savants in Paris, prior to and during the ‘water controversy’. Banks's patronage was of vital importance for individuals who sought advancement, but such patronage could also be limiting. At the end of the 1780s, Blagden and Banks experienced a rupture in their patronage relationship, shaped by the limitations of such a relationship for improving one's status examined in the final section of this paper.

Blagden and Banks's early relationship: patronage and information exchange

From the beginning of his career, Blagden's ambitions centred on the pursuit of social standing. Initially, he turned to a career in medicine, attending the University of Edinburgh where he trained as a physician before securing a small medical practice. As his career progressed, however, Blagden turned to the patronage of wealthy male scholars, and particularly Banks, whose connection bolstered his standing within privileged metropolitan social and scientific circles. Seeking Banks's patronage as a key to his entry into London's scientific community, Blagden operated as a source of information, objects and favours, carving out a role for himself as a trusted adviser and assistant.

Social standing and the notion of the ‘gentleman’ was much discussed in the eighteenth century, as an identity defined by birth, manners and metropolitan cultural identity. In his dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined a ‘gentleman’ as ‘A man of birth’ or ‘a man of extraction’, someone ‘raised above the vulgar by his character or post’ and thus possessing good manners.¹³ Key to the possession of gentlemanly manners was a familiarity with metropolitan culture, often set in opposition to less sophisticated provincial life. As Roy Porter has shown, natural philosophy was an important feature of London's fashionable culture that those in the provinces sought to assimilate into their own cultural identities in the late eighteenth century.¹⁴

Blagden came from a modest provincial family and was painfully aware, from the beginning of his career, of his lack of standing. His family had roots in the Gloucestershire textile industry, and were not of the metropolitan gentlemanly circles that Blagden later became ensconced in. In a letter to his mentor, the physician William Cullen, at Edinburgh, Blagden alluded to the meagre standing of his family:

My father dying when I was but 2 years old, & having lived profusely, left the younger children but small fortunes … My Aunt however kindly provides me a subsistence; but it is that of a very private Gent[leman], & in a way which renders my living at Bristol necessary.¹⁵

Blagden did not possess the funds or familial heritage of a gentleman, and so it was through a career in medicine that he initially sought to improve his standing. Blagden's primary aim was to relocate from Bristol to London. After graduating MD in 1768, he secured a practice with the aid of his relatives, but longed for a position in London, as complaints raised against him by local patients indicated, ‘[Blagden] without ceremony says he had rather have a thousand [pounds] a year at London than sit down with two thousand a year at Gl[oucester]’.¹⁶ Moving to the capital as a physician was not simple. One of Blagden's friends had informed him that, though a physician might earn between £2000 and £4000 a year in London, it was essential to build a strong reputation to find patients.¹⁷ To build his reputation, he applied for a position in the army, and in 1775 secured employment as a surgeon on board the hospital ship Pigot, which sailed to North America to support British troops during the American War of Independence. Blagden wrote to his aunt, stating that the post promised ‘the most effectual & honourable introduction to Practice in London that any young Physician can procure’.¹⁸

Though he had found a place as a surgeon to build a medical reputation, Blagden had also begun to seek the patronage of key figures among London's scientific community to raise his standing, chief of all Banks. Banks was a wealthy and landed gentleman, having inherited his father's fortune and estates in 1761. He rose to international celebrity in 1775, following his participation in James Cook's Endeavour voyage between 1768 and 1771, and was known for his role as a patron to aspiring natural philosophers, his other clients including individuals such as Daniel Solander, who had accompanied him on the Endeavour.¹⁹

Blagden's reasons for turning to Banks as a patron may have centred on his ambitions to emulate Banks's status. As a member of the landed gentry, Banks was free from any obligation of having to work professionally for a living. As Steven Shapin has noted, the identity of the early modern gentleman was predicated on notions of ‘free action’, ‘virtue’ and ‘independence and integrity relative to individuals in other social categories’.²⁰ Early in his career, Blagden had expressed his shame at having to work professionally to earn a living to participate in gentlemanly society. During his time as a newly graduated doctor in Gloucester, he wrote of his desire to save up money to travel to the Continent, and asked a friend ‘what income would be necessary for living decently in Geneva as a private Gent[leman], for I sho[ul]d never think of appearing in the character of a Physician’.²¹

Banks's patronage in Blagden's early career offered a preferable alternative to work as a professional doctor, and was useful in aiding his entry into London's scientific community. Having met Blagden several years prior to his departure for America, Banks had signed Blagden's election certificate for fellowship of the Royal Society in 1772.²² The two men had corresponded, with Blagden undertaking commissions for Banks—as in 1773, when Banks wrote to Blagden to ask him to arrange an itinerary for two of his Swedish contacts, a Mr Rappe and a Mr Jacobson, who wished to visit local sites of industry and agriculture on a tour through the Midlands and Wales.²³

At the start of his relationship with Banks, Blagden received reward in the form of useful metropolitan contacts, several of whom also patronized him. Letters between Blagden and Constantine Phipps, later Lord Mulgrave, whom Blagden had met through Banks, suggest that it was with Phipps's aid that he obtained his position in the army.²⁴ Another of Blagden's contacts was Henry Cavendish, for whom he worked as an experimental assistant in the 1780s.²⁵

During his time as surgeon to the army, Blagden worked to strengthen his ties to Banks. Having obtained his position in late 1775, Blagden sailed for America in February 1776. Banks had requested that Blagden send specimens of flora and fauna and news of the war.²⁶ Blagden's role as a source of news and specimens was by no means unusual. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos has drawn attention to the ‘transfer of resources’ in exchanges where individuals of inferior status hoped to obtain ‘status acknowledgement’ from a superior.²⁷ By virtue of his status as a noted collector, Banks was the recipient of numerous gifts of knowledge and objects. In the mid 1770s, Banks received specimens and information from several of his contacts, including the clergyman and naturalist John Lightfoot and the Cambridge professor Thomas Green.²⁸

The provision of gifts and news occurred in the form of correspondence. As Paula Findlen has noted, correspondence ‘bridged physical and social distance through the establishment of concrete bonds between collectors and their patrons’.²⁹ When individuals were absent or distanced from their patrons, correspondence gained added importance, owing to the conviction, as noted by Eve Tavor Bannet, that ‘to be far from sight was to be far from mind’ and at risk of being neglected when rewards were handed out.³⁰

Blagden frequently wrote to Banks with news of his progress in collecting, even when he had been unsuccessful. In July 1776, he wrote of his attempts at botanizing and preparing zoological specimens: ‘I got about 20 plants for you at Cape Fear; but it is next to impossible to dry them properly … these with about a dozen species of Fish, are all the objects of natural history that I have yet been able to procure.’³¹ Though Banks had specifically requested flora and fauna from Blagden at Cape Fear, the largest collection he received from him was an unsolicited gift of over 100 specimens of mammals, birds and fish collected in Rhode Island.³² This collection was commissioned from Blagden by the antiquary Daines Barrington on behalf of his friend the collector Ashton Lever. Blagden had met Barrington prior to his departure for America, and the two had exchanged news of scientific discoveries.³³ However, at this moment, Blagden saw Barrington's commission as an opportunity to strengthen his ties to Banks, by sending the specimens jointly to both men, and by emphasizing Banks's ‘superiority’ as a collector with a piece of flattery:

Mr. Lever wants any thing [sic] that he happens not to have in his Museum … on the contrary nothing can be an object to you [Banks] but what will conduce to the improvement of natural History as a branch of Philosophy.³⁴

Blagden's service as an army surgeon was relatively brief, and in 1779 he requested leave of absence to return to his ‘private affairs’ in Britain.³⁵ When he returned, he distanced himself from medicine, turning more decisively to his connection with Banks, who had recently been elected president of the Royal Society. After leaving America, Blagden had taken a post as a physician at Plymouth dock, a role that placed him in what he described as ‘miserable exile’ from London.³⁶ He applied to Banks for assistance in securing a residence and employment in the capital, anticipating that Banks might be inclined to show him favour after his efforts in cultivating their relationship:

Would it be possible … that I could get apartments in or adjoining to those of the R[oyal]. S[ociety]. in Somerset Place? By a residence there, I should have the convenience of that library … I imagine I could be of very essential uses by seeing that the library was kept in proper order.³⁷

Banks's reply to Blagden's request was negative, albeit polite. He apologized, ‘I wish it was in my power to forward so good a scheme as that you propose’, but that it was not possible to put the apartments ‘to other uses than those to which they were originally appropriated’.³⁸ Later in their relationship, Blagden asserted that Banks had always been careful to avoid making specific promises concerning the rewards he could expect as a client.³⁹

Having been unsuccessful with Banks, Blagden turned to another of his contacts, Henry Cavendish. Blagden had met with Cavendish prior to his departure for America, and during his time away had conducted measurements of the temperature at sea and on land at Cavendish's request.⁴⁰ Upon his return, the two men continued this research, with the aim of finding an appropriate measure to determine the mean temperature of different climates.⁴¹ Blagden began working as Cavendish's experimental assistant, and it was on Cavendish's advice in December 1782 that he began summarizing a series of experiments on the freezing point of mercury, published the following year in the Philosophical Transactions as his ‘History of the congelation of quicksilver’.⁴² It was also at this time that Cavendish began to explain his ideas on the composition of water to Blagden.⁴³ In contrast to his early relationship with Banks, Blagden received clear rewards from Cavendish, who presented him with the gift of a house opposite his own residence, at 19 Gower Street, in the spring of 1785.⁴⁴ This gift of a home secured Blagden's position within the capital, from which he continued to pursue Banks and a role within the Royal Society.

Conflicting cultures of advancement and the ‘water controversy’

During the 1780s, Blagden continued to cultivate Banks's patronage, strengthening his own career by crafting a role for himself as a trusted adviser to the president of the Royal Society. Central to Blagden's efforts were the many trips he made to Paris, where he forged important contacts among the savants there. Blagden's first visit to Paris was in 1783, and he continued to visit up until his death—at the home of the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet in Arcueil—in 1820.⁴⁵ In 1787, at Banks's request, he worked closely with the French in helping to organize the British side of the Anglo-French trigonometrical survey, an international project that connected the observatories of Paris and Greenwich across the channel.⁴⁶

Though Blagden pursued patronage with Banks, it was in the course of his visits to Paris that he encountered a contrasting culture of advancement, where ‘merit’, signalled by published outputs, functioned as a central criterion for establishing one's place within the natural philosophical community. Even on his first visit to Paris in 1783, Blagden's exchanges with Parisian savants were marred by the conflict between his own experience with Banks and a culture that privileged publications over patronage.

During his time in Paris in 1783, he travelled between the homes and workplaces of several French savants. Banks commissioned Blagden to seek out particular knowledge, including news of the latest scientific discoveries. In a letter he wrote to Blagden on 4 July 1783, Banks related news of a German discovery concerning the production of nitre, reported to him by the Irish chemist Richard Kirwan. He requested that Blagden send information concerning a related French discovery, ‘procure the secret … which lately received a prize at paris [sic] but is not yet communicated … even to their [Parisian] Chemists’.⁴⁷ Replying less than a week later, Blagden informed Banks that this information had been easy to obtain—there did not seem to be ‘the least intention of keeping it a secret’ in Paris, something apparent only to someone physically present in the city.⁴⁸ As Blagden wrote in his letter to Banks, a method had been devised by a chemist named Thouvenel, who had discovered that by mixing air from putrefaction with dephlogisticated air, achieved by depositing animal blood in an exposed pot in the presence of a calcareous base, it was possible to form nitrous acid.⁴⁹ Having been replicated by the Académie, Blagden reported that the discovery was soon to be printed.⁵⁰ He continued his investigations, noting in his diary several particulars of the production of nitre witnessed during a visit to the saltpetre works at the Paris Arsenal.⁵¹

In the course of his efforts to obtain such information for Banks, Blagden came into contact with members of the Académie des Sciences. It was during these exchanges that he encountered an alternative system for bestowing credit within the scientific community. French scientific culture at the end of the eighteenth century was increasingly governed by systems of advancement that favoured an individual's merit in terms of output, over patronage and social standing. As Alder has highlighted, institutions such as the École Militaire ranked and promoted individuals, according to mathematical ability and examination performance, as a means to achieve uniformity, precision and subordination, thus reducing ‘the visible play of patronage’.⁵²

Though such a system did not govern admission to the Académie des Sciences, advancement and influence was ostensibly bestowed upon those who contributed most in terms of scientific output.⁵³ As Charles Gillispie has noted, the Académie was divided into ranks, with the expectation that promising candidates would be promoted through the grades from probation to seniority, at each level increasing their responsibility for the management and governance of the Académie.⁵⁴ At the apex of the institution's structure were the 12 honoraires, selected from the French nobility to act as patrons and ornaments, but in practice not expected to attend the Académie. Below these were the senior men of science, known as the pensionnaires, who received a stipend as part of their membership and who directed the activities of the Académie. Below were two further ranks, the associés and the adjoints.⁵⁵ Gillispie has noted that advancement through these positions occurred when there was a vacancy higher in the structure, and on the judgement made by ‘older, secure, and outwardly satisfied’ members concerning the intelligence and diligence of ‘younger, insecure, and inwardly ambitious’ members.⁵⁶ Though it has been argued that such a structure rendered the Académie more efficacious in scientific matters through its greater exclusivity, Gillispie has noted that the system still succumbed to accusations of favouritism and sycophancy during the years of the Revolution.⁵⁷

By comparison, the Royal Society in the eighteenth century has been described as an ‘institution in the doldrums’ owing to the perceived dilution of the fellowship with ‘unscientific’ men under Banks's presidency.⁵⁸ Miller has drawn attention to the problematic nature of this assumption, and the charge that key governing positions of the Society, including council places, were given with equal weighting to members of the aristocracy with the means to patronize science and to those who engaged in scientific work.⁵⁹ Miller stresses Banks's shrewdness as a manager of constituencies in his deployment of influential aristocratic and government figures within the Society's council to ‘identify the Society with the “establishment”’ and thereby combat associations with the suspect, disruptive and radical agendas of certain strands of science around the beginnings of the Revolution.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, the Society's fellowship, an amalgam of virtuosi, aristocrats and men of science in an informal hierarchy, offers a sharp contrast to the explicit ranks of the Académie.

Blagden appears to have been sensitive to these differences in cultures of advancement. While his approach to Banks had centred on correspondence, favours and gift-giving, in Paris he brought with him several copies of his recent ‘History of the congelation of quicksilver’ to impress the French savants.⁶¹ In this paper, read before the Royal Society immediately prior to his departure, Blagden had summarized a number of experiments on the freezing of mercury.⁶² He evidently showed the paper to his new acquaintances when he arrived, and it appears to have been well received. Blagden noted in a letter to Banks that he had shown his paper to Antoine Lavoisier and his friend, the mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace and that ‘The subject of mercurial congelation was new to them in the detail’.⁶³ Clearly, Blagden was not unaware of the notion that publications earned prestige within the French scientific community.

However, Blagden was also in Paris to represent Banks, whose notions of advancement were not as sensitive to locality. As Fauque has revealed, Blagden's trip was conducted with clear aims centred on Banks's ambitions for fostering a closer relationship between the Royal Society and the Académie.⁶⁴ Operating as Banks's emissary, Blagden explored the possibility of securing Banks's election as foreign associate of the Académie, a position held by previous presidents of the Royal Society, but an honour that Banks was yet to possess, being only a corresponding member, a position below that of foreign associate.⁶⁵ Such a position within the Académie required a consideration of the candidate's merits, but to this Banks objected. In his world, merit was by no means the sole basis of membership within scientific circles. In the summer of 1783, Banks wrote to the Académie to decline their offer to continue as a corresponding member, stating that since most presidents of the Royal Society had been ‘admitted foreign Members without a severe examination of their Merits’, he felt it improper to continue as a mere corresponding member.⁶⁶

When Blagden made inquiries concerning Banks's election, doubts were raised in relation to Banks's merit as a natural philosopher. In 1783, Blagden met with two academicians, a man named as ‘Chevalier de la Mare’ and the botanist Antoine Laurent Jussieu, with whom he discussed the possibility of Banks's election as an associate member. When Blagden broached the subject, he recorded in his diary that Jussieu commented ‘no one thought’ of admitting Banks since he was ‘not yet distinguished as an author’.⁶⁷ To this statement Blagden retorted ‘we chose our Presidents, not as authors, but as patrons and encouragers of learning’.⁶⁸ In Blagden and Banks's view, patronage trumped authorship in scientific circles.

In further protest, de la Mare complained that Banks had recently hindered the progress of botanic knowledge production by withholding plates of specimens requested from him for inclusion in the latest edition of the Encylopédie.⁶⁹ De la Mare referred to Banks's refusal to remain a corresponding member of the Académie as evidence of Banks ‘breaking openly with the learned men & particularly the botanists of France’.⁷⁰ When the subject of Banks's botanical plates arose again in 1784, Blagden speculated as to the reasons for them being requested: ‘Does Jussieu or De La Mare want to get hold of your plates, & throw out the Academy [membership] as bait? Or is it seriously intended by those who do know you to convince those who do not that they ought to vote for you?’⁷¹

In this exchange, Banks's identity within the scientific community was set in contrast to that of French academicians, with Blagden caught in the middle. Though Blagden understood the value of publication, he needed to convince local savants on Banks's behalf that publications alone were insufficient criteria for scientific judgement. As Blagden speculated, the apparent concern for obtaining Banks's plates may have been prompted by underhand motives. Alternatively, it may have been aimed at proving Banks's reputation as a published man of science. In the end, Banks decided the risk concerning his plates was not worth taking, and he continued as a corresponding member.⁷² When Banks was elected foreign associate in 1787, it was as a reward for his assistance in providing the French surgeon Jacques Tenon with introductions during a visit to Britain. On this occasion, the normal election procedure was circumvented, and Banks was appointed to the Académie by the request of the French king, in an overt display of patronage over merit.⁷³

Competing cultures of advancement also impinged on Blagden's exchanges that precipitated the ‘water controversy’. The events of the controversy had begun in 1781, when Cavendish repeated an experiment conducted by the lecturer John Warltire in which inflammable and dephlogisticated airs were electrically detonated to produce a dew that was identified by Cavendish as water. Cavendish communicated his experiment to Joseph Priestley, who repeated it and informed James Watt. During his visit to Paris in the summer of 1783, Blagden communicated both Watt's and Cavendish's experiments to Lavoisier, who replicated them before the Académie. Lavoisier published an account of the experiment, but neglected to mention what Blagden had communicated to him of Cavendish and Watt's experiments. While Cavendish had begun working on the experiment in March 1783, his account was not read at the Royal Society until January 1784. By this time, both Watt and Lavoisier had already published their accounts of the experiments, despite having conducted them after Cavendish.⁷⁴

As Jungnickel, McCormmach and Miller have highlighted, the water controversy, though it ‘simmered’ during the lifetime of the protagonists, was only really ‘fanned to white heat’ in the mid nineteenth century, when biographers of Watt and Cavendish sought to claim posthumous priority.⁷⁵ The British statesman Henry Brougham and the Scottish biographer James Patrick Muirhead, in their biographies of Watt published in the 1840s, accused Blagden of being overzealous and underhand in working to secure Cavendish's priority.⁷⁶ A decade later, the Edinburgh chemist and professor George Wilson, in his biography of Cavendish, asserted that Blagden had been a ‘strictly conscientious man’ and had done little wrong during the whole affair.⁷⁷

Blagden's experiences during the controversy suggest the events as an instance where French emphasis on publication came into conflict with gentlemanly codes of behaviour. As revealed in relation to his communication of news concerning Thouvenel's nitre experiments, Blagden was constantly sharing discoveries informally in correspondence and conversation. In this, there was nothing he saw as dubious. On 24 June 1783, Blagden met with Lavoisier and Laplace and informed them of Priestley's and Cavendish's experiments on the composition of water. The next day, he wrote to Banks with news that ‘the important experiment of Mr Cavendish's relative to the production of water … was repeated at Mr Lavoisier's, in consequence of the account I had given of it’.⁷⁸ Blagden continued that an account of Lavoisier's experiment ‘was read today before the Academy’.⁷⁹ In this letter, Blagden gave no indication of disappointment at the way his information had been used by the French chemist, writing instead of his excitement and pride, ‘it is likely to make great noise here … I beheld the operation with great pleasure’.⁸⁰ In his diary entry for 25 June, the day of Lavoisier's performance of the experiment, Blagden noted his own interjection during the Académie's meeting, in which he corrected an attribution error made by Lavoisier, ‘M. Lavoisier explained the experiment … called it Dr Priestleys, but I set him right before the Society that it was Mr. Cavendish's’.⁸¹ Even regarding Lavoisier's oral omission, Blagden was not particularly disgruntled.

The problem came a year later, after Lavoisier published his account of the experiment, when Blagden expressed his anger at what he interpreted as Lavoisier's rush to claim credit in print without acknowledging Cavendish. In a draft of a letter he wrote to Laplace, written to inform him of Cavendish's most recent work on the experiment, Blagden promised to provide further information as soon as it was published:

I would with pleasure have done it before, had not M. Lavoisier's conduct relative to Mr Cavendish's former discovery, of which you were yourself a witness from beginning to end, suggested a degree of caution which I had been accustomed to think unnecessary among gentlemen.⁸²

It was not Lavoisier's performance of the experiment that Blagden considered inappropriate, but his rush to publish and obtain credit. Lavoisier was a wealthy tax farmer, and as such Blagden may have expected him to behave as a gentleman, according to codes he was familiar with in Britain. In his connection to Banks as his patron, it is possible that Blagden considered publication for personal gain as ungentlemanly. John Beaglehole, in explaining why Banks published so little during his life, has suggested that, at a time when many individuals were vying for publication, such behaviour was not considered gentlemanly.⁸³ Banks appears to have had a hostile attitude towards publishing in general, infamously declaring of the Royal Society's fellowship that ‘we want no authors’.⁸⁴ Lavoisier's rush to publish was correspondingly interpreted by Blagden as ‘ungentlemanly’, and he later hastened to ensure Cavendish's name was associated with the discovery by publishing an account of the controversy in the journal Chemische Annalen.⁸⁵ Though publication was clearly important to Blagden and Cavendish for securing priority and prestige, Blagden had not expected that Lavoisier would rush to publish to further his own career. On this occasion, the prestige afforded to scientific publications in France rendered Blagden's communication of Cavendish's experiment problematic.

The breakdown of Blagden's relationship with Banks

After his return from Paris in 1783, Blagden continued his efforts as Banks's client, supporting him during the ‘dissensions’, a dispute which took place in the autumn of 1783 and saw a faction at the Royal Society challenge Banks's presidency.⁸⁶ In a recent re-assessment of the dispute, Benjamin Wardhaugh has argued that one of the key charges levelled against Banks by his opposition, who accused him of judging applicants to the Society on their social standing rather than their science, was a ‘defence against tyranny, linked with a defence of professional skill and individual merit’.⁸⁷ Such analysis suggests a further example of conflicting cultures of advancement in Blagden and Banks's world. Reporting on the grievances of Banks's opposition at the Society, Blagden further cultivated his position by offering his support, serving as Banks's ‘eyes and ears’ during the dispute.⁸⁸ Banks was pleased by Blagden's efforts, and confided in him ‘how Easy & happy I should feel myself if I had you in Maty's place [as secretary] … I had frequently conceived an Idea of proposing it to you’.⁸⁹ When Paul Henry Maty resigned as secretary during the ongoing dispute, it was with Banks's blessing that Blagden ran for and successfully obtained the position of secretary of the Royal Society.⁹⁰ This position offered Blagden the reward he had been pursuing since his return from America—a formal position at the Royal Society.

Despite Blagden's success, at the end of the 1780s his relationship with Banks soured, and in 1788 he threatened to resign as secretary of the Society. Frictions had developed in their relationship centred on tensions between the image that Blagden sought to cultivate as a gentleman and the realities of his attempts to achieve this through Banks's patronage. It is possible that Blagden's exposure to meritocratic cultures led him to question his standing with Banks.

In February 1788, Blagden wrote to Banks stating that he wished to resign as secretary, declaring that the role had not conformed to his expectations:

D[ea]r Sir, In cons[e]q[uen]ce. of our conversation this morning, join[e]d to sev[eral]’ other circumst[an]ces. that have occurred not conformable to the ideas which induced me to be a candidate for the office of Sec[retar]y to the R[oyal]. S[ociety]. I am now come to the resolution of resigning that office.⁹¹

This letter marked the beginning of a break in Blagden and Banks's relationship that had resulted from a growing difference between the expectations of both parties for work and reward. The dissolution of Blagden and Banks's patronage relationship was a gradual one, but by the mid 1790s the two men had drifted apart from one another.

As Noah Heringman has noted, cultural histories have tended to highlight the role of patrons in producing knowledge, to the detriment of their paid clients.⁹² Though often described as ‘clients’, Heringman argues that these individuals, including ‘fieldworkers, guides, illustrators, and other, often self-trained, practical scholars’, are better described as collaborators and ‘knowledge workers’ who provided ‘research-for-hire’ for their patrons.⁹³

Banks was a patron to many clients and expected certain work in exchange for his favour. One of the rewards he dispensed was money, a reward that had implications for the status of a client's hired research and Banks's control over their output. As Shapin has revealed in relation to the ‘invisible technician’, the social and epistemological status of secretaries and assistants was problematic. Where one individual was in the paid employ of another, the employee was subordinated to the employer in a relationship where authority and autonomy were exchanged for financial reward.⁹⁴ Such a relationship was complicated when one sought credibility as a natural philosopher. As Shapin notes, it was vital for producers of natural philosophical knowledge to be seen as possessing ‘free action’ and ‘virtue’, attributes synonymous with being an independent gentleman.⁹⁵

Banks's relationship with one of his early clients, the artist Sydney Parkinson, draughtsman on the Endeavour voyage, illustrates the complex relationship between a paid employee and their patron. On the voyage, Parkinson's status was ostensibly that of a salaried client, paid by Banks to produce botanical and other images.⁹⁶ In addition to producing drawings for Banks, Parkinson assembled collections of ethnographic and zoological material and produced his own diary of the voyage, outputs that had not been specifically requested by Banks.⁹⁷ Parkinson died during the voyage and, upon the Endeavour's return, Banks became embroiled in a dispute with Sydney's brother, Stanfield Parkinson, who accused him of embezzling Sydney's personal papers and collections. As Heringman has argued, the ensuing dispute was a debate over whether Banks's status as a patron entitled him to all of Parkinson's intellectual output, or if, as a ‘legal employer’, his only right was to the work produced under the terms of the contract.⁹⁸

In the first instance, Blagden's relationship with Banks was not that of a paid client. In the 1770s, Banks enjoyed his assistance in the form of favours. As previously mentioned, Banks relied on Blagden as an informal source of knowledge, recommendations and specimens. In these initial stages, it was unclear what Blagden could expect to receive as a reward. Though gift exchange was predicated on reciprocity, Banks never formally stated what he would or could offer to Blagden in return for gifts and favours.⁹⁹ Though Blagden sometimes requested rewards, including employment at the Royal Society, Banks could refuse.

When Blagden began working as secretary to the Society, his relationship with Banks changed. As secretary, Blagden received an honorarium.¹⁰⁰ In contrast to the Académie in France, where all members of pensionnaire standing received a stipend, the receipt of an income for the work he performed set Blagden apart from Banks and the other fellows. The tasks of the secretary, as codified in the Society's statutes, included ‘care of [the Society's] books, documents and correspondence’, attendance at all meetings, the production of notes and minutes, and the drawing up of all letters ‘written in the name of the Society’.¹⁰¹

Letters Blagden sent to Banks while serving as secretary reveal the kinds of tasks he undertook. On 22 October 1786, Blagden wrote to Banks to update him on the progress of his duties ahead of the next meeting, mentioning his management of correspondence and his reading of submitted papers:

The inclosed [sic] letter, directed to the Secretary of the R[oyal]. S[ociety]. I opened on the idea that it might perhaps contain a paper for us; it proves to be merely a request to lay some machines before the Society for approbation … Abbé Mann's paper on Hygrometrie brought by Mr. Planta, I have now read; it is perfectly foolish, but still with a certain degree of obscurity & pomp which will make it pass … It will fully occupy one meeting.¹⁰²

Though such work was ostensibly for the Society, rather than for Banks, Blagden's correspondence regarding these duties suggests that in his eyes, Banks was the one who dictated his tasks.

Banks expected further work from Blagden, suggestive of his view of him as a personal assistant. Blagden expressed anger at having to complete these tasks not formally required of the Society's secretary. In March 1789, he complained about having to draw up an address on Banks's behalf:

Before I received your letters, desiring me to draw up the address to the King and [Lord] Lucan, I had intended not to undertake any new business for yourself or the Royal Society except such as should be required by the duties of my office.¹⁰³

A year later, Blagden was still performing additional work for Banks. In March 1790, he produced a report detailing investigations into a method of determining duties applied to spirituous liquors (see Figure 1). As Blagden wrote at the beginning of the published report, this work had been done,

In consequence of an application from Government to Sir Joseph Banks … for the best means of ascertaining the just proportion of duty to be paid by any kind of spirituous liquor that should come before the Officers of Excise … I was requested by that Gentleman [Banks] to assist in planning the proper experiments for this purpose, and to draw up the Report.¹⁰⁴

Figure 1.

Draft of Blagden's ‘Report on the best method of proportioning the excise upon spirituous liquors’, and the results of his experiments conducted for Banks and the British government. Royal Society, CB/4/6, folder BLA.6, f. 56r (Charles Blagden, draft of report on experiments on spirituous liquors, 1790). (Copyright © The Royal Society.)

In requesting he undertake this work, Blagden felt that Banks had abused the nature of their relationship. Furthermore, he argued that Banks had failed to reward him appropriately. Blagden explicitly stated the rewards he had expected to receive, rewards that had not been forthcoming:

The slight literary reputation, if any, to be acquired by a work of this kind, is not, to me, a sufficient object; human life affords others of greater importance, namely the improvement of one's fortune, and the advancement of one's situation in society … I could not help suspecting your motive … to have been, that I was in the habit of working for nothing, whereas any one else you had employed must have been paid.¹⁰⁵

Blagden's expectation that Banks would provide him with ‘fortune’ and ‘situation in society’ was paradoxical, particularly in light of sentiments he had previously expressed in relation to financial reward. As previously mentioned, Blagden's ambition to become a gentleman posed problems when receiving monetary rewards, since it was ungentlemanly to be seen to earn an income.¹⁰⁶ At the beginning of his dispute with Banks, Blagden had written of his desire to return all of his income derived from Banks and the Society when he first threatened to resign:

After my resignation, I shall be happy to assist & promote, as far as lies in my power, and as my situation will permit, the pursuits and interests of the Royal Society in the same manner as I used to do before I was Sec.[retary]; but I perceive it must be a voluntary act, & not cons[idere]^d as a duty … It was & is my wish, that the Society would accept the different sums I have rec[eive]^d by way of Salary, as the commencement of a fund for the purchase of books … amounting to about £250.¹⁰⁷

In proposing to return his salary, Blagden noted that it would be more conducive to his status to complete his work voluntarily, rather than as a paid obligation.

Throughout the break in the relationship, Blagden expressed his anxieties concerning money. Banks found this baffling, and complained that Blagden's ‘sentiments in regard to money were different from & more delicate than those of mankind in general’.¹⁰⁸ The two men were worlds apart in terms of their finances. In 1807, it was reputed that Banks earned 14 000 pounds a year, derived from his estates. By his death in 1820, this had risen to 30 000 pounds.¹⁰⁹ Banks's income far exceeded Blagden's, who in his early career had lived off a stipend of a few hundred pounds provided by his aunt, his half pay from the army and his salary from the Royal Society, calculated by Banks as roughly 70 pounds per year.¹¹⁰

While Blagden had to work to earn money, Banks's income came from his estates worked by others, as a member of the landed gentry. It was this difference between the financial and social worlds of the two men, coupled with Blagden's desire to achieve the standing of a gentleman, that resulted in tension in their relationship. When Blagden asserted that he had expected to be paid for his work on spirituous liquors, Banks declared ‘I have spent much time in the service of different departments of government … & never asked or thought of reward’.¹¹¹ A few days later, Banks complained that Blagden's demands had come as a surprise,

that a connexion should have existed between us for near 20 years without my discovering till lately how far the motive to it on your side was an expectation that I Should be the means of improving your fortune or advancing your Situation in Society may appear to you extraordinary but it is nevertheless True.¹¹²

At this moment in their relationship, Blagden was fearful that Banks had behaved duplicitously. In an essay-style draft of a letter, Blagden spoke of having ‘followed’ Banks and thereby orchestrated his own downfall, by turning away from a career in medicine:

on my return from America I had a good prospect of success in the practice of Physick if I had then directed my attention that way … At that period, however, Sir Joseph made use of every art to induce me to attach myself to him & his pursuits. He professed himself in the strongest terms my friend, & frequently declared his intention & wishes to be useful to me on all occasions … He continued this style of behaviour till after I became secretary of the Royal Society, & was as he thought, so far involved in that situation as to have no other path left open to me.¹¹³

Blagden suggested that Banks had tricked him, with vague promises of unspecified rewards, ‘He had always the address to avoid specific promises’, into a relationship that had rendered him a servant rather than an equal and gentleman.¹¹⁴ He noted that Banks, having secured his service,

never made any effort either to improve my fortune or raise my situation in the world … His sole object from the beginning was to make me the tool of his ambition … to keep me as low & dependent as possible.¹¹⁵

Blagden wrote of his fear that it was Banks's intention to abandon him, ‘He now, I believe, thinks that he has got from me almost as much as I can give him, & rather wishes me out of the way’.¹¹⁶ Blagden was not alone in these anxieties towards Banks. Another of Banks's clients, the chemist Humphry Davy, commented that Banks ‘was always ready to promote the objects of men of science; but he required to be regarded as a patron, and readily swallowed gross flattery’.¹¹⁷ In requiring advancement of standing and fortune, it is possible that Blagden sought too much from Banks, who was happy to see his own elevated status preserved while his clients remained his subordinates.

Though Blagden had threatened to resign as secretary in 1788, and again in 1790, he continued to work for the Royal Society and Banks until 1797. Miller has argued that, to some extent, the knighthood that Blagden received in 1792 dispelled some of the tension with Banks.¹¹⁸ Blagden was evidently pleased by this honour and the greater status it afforded him. Writing to his brother, John, he mused that a knighthood had given him ‘a title more convenient for travelling than that of Doctor’.¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, in the early 1790s, Blagden began to distance himself from Banks, forging a new circle of friends and voluntary attachments. The period of his closeness with Banks had enabled him to cultivate a network of friends among the London aristocracy, including the likes of George Spencer, second Earl Spencer, and his wife Lavinia, and Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, with whom he spent increasingly more time.¹²⁰ This change in Blagden's social circles did not go unnoticed by Banks, who lamented his frequent absences from his duties as secretary and client owing to his ‘habits … lately adopted of mixing much in the Gay Circles of the more Elevated ranks of Society’.¹²¹ In 1797, Blagden resigned as secretary of the Royal Society. Though he continued to correspond and meet with Banks for the rest of his life, the nature of their relationship had changed to one in which Blagden was no longer his salaried client.

Conclusion

During and prior to his service as secretary of the Royal Society, Blagden was one of Banks's key assistants, a role he cultivated to advance his social standing. By offering gifts of information and objects, Blagden worked to secure Banks's patronage as an eminent gentleman of science. Blagden appealed to Banks by operating as a source of news from Paris, engaging in exchanges with Parisian savants on Banks's behalf. During these exchanges he experienced a conflict between patronage and publication as differing cultures of advancement among natural philosophical communities. This conflict caused problems during Blagden's trip to Paris in 1783 and informed the events of the ‘water controversy’, a dispute where the prestige afforded to publication in Paris rendered Blagden's oral transmission of a scientific discovery problematic. When he returned home, Blagden continued to cultivate Banks's patronage, offering his support during the dissensions, after which he became secretary of the Royal Society. While this position represented the culmination of Blagden's successful efforts to win Banks's patronage, their relationship soured just four years later. Though patronage had enabled Blagden to achieve a position in London's scientific community, Banks was ultimately unable to provide the rewards that Blagden sought, with patronage placing severe limitations on the social advancement he could expect to receive.

Though perhaps more closely associated with earlier centuries of the early modern period, this paper has revealed that Blagden and Banks's relationship was one that centred on the transfer of information and objects in exchange for reward. Where Delbourgo and Marples have shown that the patronage networks of Hans Sloane enabled ambitious naturalists to advance their own careers, this paper has indicated that Blagden made use of a similar strategy, marshalling information and objects in correspondence to foster his position.¹²² Though Watts has described Blagden as one of the ‘elder statesmen of the British scientific community’, as Banks's friend and supporter such a position was one that had to be carefully cultivated.¹²³

This paper has also extended the current scholarship on Blagden's role as a conduit for information between Britain and France, setting it in the context of his relationship with Banks. By examining the difficulties that Blagden faced when he communicated with Parisian savants, both for himself and on Banks's behalf, the differing characters of natural philosophical communities are revealed. This provides a new perspective on Banks's relationship with the Académie des Sciences in Paris, highlighting the sometimes fraught nature of information exchange in the context of competing cultures of advancement among natural philosophical communities.