Chemistry and the Chemical Industry in the 19th Century: The Henrys of Manchester and Other Studies

In view of the price, I wonder if this volume of collected papers really serves any worthwhile purpose. Wilfred Farrar is sorely missed: he died in 1977 at the early age of 57, and his papers are always worth reading again. His pioneering work on the Henry family of Manchester (with his wife, Kathleen, and E. L. Scott) deserves to be preserved in a permanent form. Is this the way to go about it, though? The book contains papers on numerous topics, ranging from sanitary science to the chemical elements, early synthetic dyes, and the German university system. Surely it would have been far better to have collected papers on a common theme. On the basis of Farrar’s own papers, one could envisage books on Mancunian science, the history of dyes (in which Farrar’s paper could have been put along the more recent research of A. S. Travis), and the development of chemical education, to name just three. By comparison, to use authors as the guiding principle, as Variorum has done, seems an easy option of limited value.

Even if we accept the principle of collecting all of Wilfred Farrar’s papers into a single volume, I am not sure this one really does his work justice. He intended to publish the work on the Henrys as a book, but no publisher would accept it. It is a sad reflection of the academic prejudice against biographies and “second rank” science in the early 1970s. So the Farrars and Scott were forced to publish their material bit by bit in Ambix. They were excellent papers, but there is considerable overlap among them, and there are changes in emphasis as the papers were published. One wonders if this part of Farrar’s work could have been rewritten and published as he originally planned. Although W. H. Brock has written a fine introduction, it would have been a good idea to have produced an introduction to each paper, in which later work could have been presented and any errors in Farrar’s papers corrected. Several scholars, each with their own area of expertise, could have contributed here, and I am sure we would have all been happy to honor Wilfred’s memory in this way.

Nonetheless, the book exists, so what does it contain? Over half the book is devoted to the papers on the Henry family. They lived in Manchester and made their money from a “milk of magnesia” indigestion remedy. In the days before modern antiulcer and antacid treatments there was obviously a great deal of money to be made from such remedies, which are still popular today. The Henrys, especially William Henry, were very interested in science and knew John Dalton. It is a fascinating account of provincial science around 1800 as experienced by knowledgeable bystanders. Of the remaining papers, the ones on Richard Laming and the coal gas industry, Richard Angus Smith and water pollution, and Andrew Ure and the philosophy of manufactures will be of the most interest to readers of Technology and Culture. The latter two appeared in Notes and Records of the Royal Society, which is hardly a mainstream journal for the history of technology, and American readers, in particular, may be unfamiliar with his work in these areas. As someone who has studied the early history of nitrogen fixation and synthetic dyes, it was a great pleasure to read Farrar’s papers on these neglected topics again, and they have never been supplanted. This volume will be useful for teaching collections in libraries that do not subscribe to Ambix and Notes and Records, individuals who need to refer frequently to the papers on the Henrys, and the many friends and admirers of Wilfred Farrar.