The Collected Letters of Thomas Beddoes, ed. Tim Fulford and Dahlia Porter (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

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Dr. Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808) was, in Roy Porter's words, 'a central late-Enlightenment figure', a man of great influence on the development of science, medicine and literature because of his transmission of ideas in lectures, in print and in letters (Porter, Doctor of Society, p. 5). By dint of his theoretical publications, experimental programme and, most of all, his vast correspondence network, Beddoes played a leading role in moving Enlightenment thought across generations and borders, fomenting developments in fields from therapeutic medicine to chemistry to poetry. Because of his diverse network of correspondents-and because his letters range across a multitude of subjects and engage with medical and philosophical tenets that many of his British contemporaries only knew of anecdotally-Beddoes's 900+ letters present a new and potentially transformative picture of the ways in which innovations in science, medicine, literature and politics were mutually generative in this period. They provide a striking new perspective on how correspondence networks-both within Britain and internationally-shaped a 'culture of enquiry' in which investigations in literature medicine, chemistry, philosophy, and social reform were pursued together. Our project will publish The Collected Letters of Thomas Beddoes, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 2026). This edition, edited to the highest scholarly standards will contain over 900 letters to major literary and scientific figures including Joseph Black, S. T. Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, James Keir, Thomas Malthus, John Murray, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Thomas Wedgwood. The edition will provide fully annotated texts, expanding our knowledge of Beddoes's literary, scientific, and medical networks and their role in developing significant changes in the intellectual and technological culture of Britain and Europe. These changes include the institutionalisation of scientific research, the development of preventive medicine, the introduction of largescale data gathering, the pioneering of Romantic poetry, the introduction to Britain of Lavoiserian chemistry and Kantian philosophy, and the dissemination in Europe of new medical theory.We will also publish 3 articles in journals on Beddoes and his correspondence. We will organise 3 public-facing symposia at which the letters of Beddoes and their significance in the histories of literature, science and medicine will be debated by Fulford, Porter and members of the edition's Advisory Board (Jan Golinski, Frank James, Trevor Levere, Neil Vickers) with academics from literary, editorial and historical disciplines and with the public. We will publish letter transcriptions open access, free-to-read, on a De Montfort-hosted website.