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reinterpreted late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment science as a mysterious, romantic adventure into the unknown. Close friend of Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar men. His most influential pictures were The Orrery (1767, frontispiece of this book), The Air Pump (1768, National Gallery, London) and The Alchemist (Derby, 1770). He also produced some striking, almost apocalyptic industrial scenes of factories and forges (especially at night), and many fine individual portraits.
    EDWARD YOUNG, 1683-1765. Poet and clergyman. His major work, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742), a poem in twelve books, was a traditional Christian meditation on the way the universe demonstrated God’s design and divine creativity. He announced, ‘An undevout astronomer is mad,’ though he had some doubts about the size and complication of the cosmos as revealed by Newton’s mathematics: ‘Perhaps a seraph’s computation fails!’ (Book IX, lines 1, 226-35). A later edition of the poem was superbly illustrated with William Blake’s watercolour engravings, a consolation for those terrified by the new cosmology.

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    The Bigger Picture
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