The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 Book

Winner of the 2006 Roy G. Neville Prize for Biography Awarded by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, inThe Enlightened Joseph Priestley Robert Schofield completes his two-volume biography of one of the great figures of the English Enlightenment. The first volume, published in 1997, covered the first forty years of Joseph Priestley's life in England. In this second volume, Schofield surveys the mature years of Priestley, including the achievements that were to make him famous the discovery of oxygen, the defenses of Unitarianism, and the political liberalism that characterized his later life. He also recounts Priestley's flight to Pennsylvania in 1794 and the final years of his life spent along the Susquehanna in Northumberland. Together, the two volumes will stand as the standard biography of Priestley for years to come. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), a contemporary and friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, exceeded even these polymaths in the breadth of his curiosity and learning. Yet Priestley is often portrayed in negative terms, as a restless intellect, incapable of confining himself to any single task, without force or originality, and marked by hasty and superficial thought. In The Enlightened Joseph Priestley, he emerges as a man who was more than a lucky empiricist in science, more than a naive political liberal, more than an exhaustive compiler of superficial evidence in militant support of Unitarianism. In fact, he was learned in an extraordinary variety of subjects, from grammar, education, aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and theology to natural philosophy. Priestley was, in fact, a man of the Enlightenment. Praise for The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley (1997): It is with great pleasure that one turns to this long anticipated biography of Priestley by Robert Schofield. . . . The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley begins the daunting task of finally producing an integrated overview of Priestley the man, the scientist, the theologian, the political theorist, and the educator begins, rather than completes, because Schofield has chosen to terminate his account in 1773, the year that Priestley turned forty. The amount of information on Priestley is so vast that at least two volumes will be required to complete the task. . . . Though chemists will be disappointed that Schofield's decision to terminate his account in 1773 means that most of Priestley s most important work on pneumatic chemistry is not covered, they will still find the book of great interest and will be likely, like the reviewer, to keep their fingers crossed in anticipation that we will soon see the publication of volume two. --William B. Jensen, Journal of Chemical EducationRead More