Erasmus Darwin in Lichfield, Staffordshire

'THE RESIDENCE OF
ERASMUS DARWIN M.D. F.R.S.
BORN 1731.     (FROM 1756 TO 1781.)      DIED 1802.
AUTHOR OF "THE BOTANIC GARDEN" & C.'

Darwin was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a physician, scientist, inventor, poet and botanist. The above date of Darwin's arrival at the house in Lichfield, Staffordshire, is slightly incorrect: he in fact moved here in 1758, less than a year after marrying Polly Howard, by whom he had three sons. Polly died in 1770.

A model of Darwin looks out onto Beacon Street.

After the death of his wife, Darwin had two daughters by Mary Parker, a young woman employed to help with the children.

The third edition of The Botanic Garden, dated 1791.

Interpretation panels mention the influence of Darwin's writings on other writers. One states that he influenced 'nearly all' the early Romantic poets, and draws attention to Darwin's The Loves of the Plants influencing Blake's The Book of Thel. Also mentioned is Darwin's influence on the young (although not the older) Wordsworth and Coleridge in, for example, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), and also the later published 'Kubla Khan' (1816). Also briefly mentioned are Keats and Shelley, with a note giving what is almost certainly the writer's only source of reference: Desmond King-Hele's Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).

The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes (London: J. Johnson, 1803): a posthumous publication. There have been many editions of this book, some of them published relatively recently.

An example of Darwin the inventor: a sketch of his effective speaking machine, built in 1771.

A reconstruction of Darwin's study, with Joseph Wright's portrait of him above the mantelpiece and, by the model's head: 

Darwin's friend Anna Seward, painted by T. Kettle in 1762. I briefly mentioned her earlier when I showed photos of her memorial in Lichfield Cathedral. The link is at the bottom of this post.

Also in Erasmus Darwin House is the portrait of the Reverend Chancellor Thomas James Law, described by an unnamed source as a 'one man civic society'. Law gave the town the statue of Samuel Johnson in the Market Square in Lichfield (also shown, in several images, in a link below), the country's second free library (in Beacon Street), and the fountain in the museum gardens.

Law was buried in St Michael's churchyard in Lichfield. There is a local tale that the tomb (built for his wife) is elaborate because it is in defiance of the council, which wouldn't allow him to erect a Gothic canopy over Johnson's statue like the statue of Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh.

'The home of

Erasmus

Darwin

from 1758

until 1781'

In 1775 Darwin met Elizabeth Pole, a married woman from Radbourne Hall in Derbyshire whom he married in 1781, the year after her husband's death. Erasmus moved with his wife to Radbourne Hall, and then to Full Street, Derby, in 1783; in 1802 he died, just a few weeks after moving to Breadsall Priory and just four months before the death of his much younger wife (by whom he had seven more children).

A back view of the house.

Only a few yards from Darwin's house, and still on Beacon Street:

'ON THIS SITE STOOD

THE HOME OF DAVID GARRICK,

BORN 1716. [Actually 1717.]      DIED 1779.

     PULLED DOWN IN 1856.

 ––––––––––––

EDUCATED AT LICHFIELD GRAMMAR SCHOOL.

   BURIED AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY.'

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Noel Jackson: 'Rhyme and Reason: Erasmus Darwin's Romanticism'

Anna Seward (1747-1809), Lichfield, Staffordshire

Dr Samuel Johnson and Lichfield, Staffordshire

Anna Seward (1747-1809), Lichfield, Staffordshire, England

Anna Seward was born in Eyam, Derbyshire. She was a Romantic poet who, after moving to Lichfield in 1750, spent the rest of her life there, latterly at the Bishop's Palace. She was close to the adopted Honora Sneyd, after whose marriage she produced some of her best work. She never married and spent years looking after her sick father. She was part of a literary circle that included Erasmus Darwin.

After her poem 'Elegy on Captain Cook' (1780), she was named 'the Swan of Lichfield', worked with Darwin on The Botanic Garden, and published a biography of him on his death in 1802. Among others, she was in correspondence with Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Her memorial in Lichfield cathedral bears a poem by Sir Walter Scott:

'Amid these Aisles, where once his precepts shew'd,
The heavenward pathway which in life he trode,
This simple tablet marks a Father’s bier;
And those he loved in life, in death are near.
For him, for them, a daughter bade it rise,
Memorial of domestic charities.
Still would you know why o’er the marble spread,
In female grace the willow droops her head;
Why on her branches, silent and unstrung,
The minstrel harp, is emblematic hung;
What Poet’s voice is smother’d here in dust,
Till waked to join the chorus of the just;
Lo! one brief line an answer sad supplies—
Honour’d, belov’d, and mourn’d, here Seward lies:
Her worth, her warmth of heart, our sorrows say:
Go seek her genius in her living lay.'

She has become something of a gay icon.

Also in the cathedral are the Chad Gospels in the chapter house, which were probably written by a monk from Lindisfarne in 730AD, and contain 236 pages on vellum. They include Matthew's and Mark's gospels, and the beginning of Luke's. Eight pages are illuminated, of which two are illustated here.

The Herkenrode glass is perhaps the most impressive feature of Lichfield Cathedral. Unfortunately, at the moment of writing, the windows are being preserved and cannot be seen by the public. The story behind the windows is interesting, as the minor poet Brooke Boothby (1744-1824), 6th Baronet of Broadlaw Ash in Derbyshire, was responsible for their being here.

In 1801 Boothby visited the Lowlands and discovered that the Herkenrode glass from the former abbey, which was closed and sold in 1797, had been removed by the owner. Boothby was much impressed by it, and negociated for the purchase for Lichfield Cathedral. He paid £200 for the glass, including transport, the Dean and Chapter later repaid him, and installation was complete in 1805.

Boothby moved in the Lichfield literary circle with the likes of Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward, and was reponsible for publishing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions in Lichfield. The painting above is by Joseph Wright of Derby, and shows him holding a book by Rousseau.

A view of the nave facing east, where the Herkenrode glass is covered up for repairs.

The nave facing west from the choir.

The rood screen.

The font in the north transept.