Joseph Priestley was born at Fieldhead, in the parish of Birstall, near Leeds, on March 13 (Old Style), 1733.[1] He was named after his paternal grandfather, “an eminent tradesman, as much famed for his heavenly conduct as his grandson (Joseph) has since been for natural abilities.”
“The Priestleys,” writes Madame Belloc, the great-granddaughter of the subject of this memoir, in her charming essay, “Joseph Priestley in Domestic Life” (Contemporary Review, October 1894), “were of an old Presbyterian stock; one branch of the family acquired wealth and lived at Whiteways, but his (Joseph’s) own immediate ancestors were farmers and clothiers, people of substance in the yeoman class. We can trace them accurately as far as the middle of the seventeenth century, when one Phœbe Priestley, after wrestling with fever in her household, was herself stricken, and ‘lay like a lamb before the Lord’ on her deathbed. Her husband wrote a long and touching account of all she said and did, that her children might know what manner of mother they had lost. These people were presumably of the same stock as the Priestleys of Soylands, who ran back into the Middle Ages.
“The children of the Priestley families were all named after scriptural characters. They were Josephs, Timothys and Sarahs from one generation to another. The Bible was stamped into them, and from it they drew all the inspiration of their lives.”
Joseph Priestley the elder was born in 1660, and died on August 2, 1745. He married Sarah Healey and had by her eight children, five sons and three daughters, of whom Jonas, the father of Joseph Priestley the younger, born about 1700, was the seventh child and fourth son. Jonas Priestley married Mary, a daughter of Joseph Swift, a farmer and maltster of Shafton, near Wakefield, and had by her six children, four sons and two daughters, of whom Joseph was the eldest and Timothy the second; Martha, the elder girl, who died in 1812, married John Crouch, and was left a widow in poor circumstances in 1786. Another member of the Priestley family who requires mention for the purpose of this narrative is Sarah, the sister of Jonas and second daughter of Joseph Priestley the elder. She was born in 1692 and married John Keighley—“a man who had distinguished himself for his zeal for religion and for his public spirit.” She was left a widow in 1745. Three years before this she took her nephew Joseph, the subject of this memoir, to live with her, and “was fond of him in the extreme.” She died in 1764. Her brother John, Joseph Priestley the younger’s uncle, died on February 28, 1786, aged ninety-two. “He was a remarkable man and of a singularly happy constitution, both of body and mind.”
This happy constitution of body and mind seems indeed to have been a characteristic of many members of the family, the several branches of which were remarkably healthy and long-lived.
Priestley says of his father Jonas that he had uniformly better spirits than any man he ever knew, and by this means was as happy towards the close of life, when reduced to poverty and dependent upon others, as in his best days. These facts are not without interest as serving to account for much that we shall have occasion to note in the character and temperament of the subject of this biography.
Fieldhead, the house in which he first saw the light, had been occupied by the family for several generations. It was a small two-storey building, built of stone and slated with flag, similar in character to many of the houses still standing in the district, the long, low windows in the upper storeys betokening that they were formerly occupied by weavers. It was last lived in by Martha Priestley (Mrs Crouch), but on the death of her husband in 1786 was abandoned by the family, and, falling into decay, was pulled down about fifty years ago.
The Priestleys were a simple, sober, honest, God-fearing folk, staunch Calvinists, and deeply religious. Jonas Priestley was a manufacturer of “home-spun”—a weaver and cloth dresser—two trades now distinct but then practised in common—who took his week’s work on ass-back, on roads little better than bridle-paths, to the Sunday market in Leeds. He was of a class characteristic of the district.
These hand-loom weavers, who lived in the hill country lying to the west of Leeds, were generally men of small capitals; they often annexed a small farm to their business, or possessed a field or two on which to support a horse and cow, and were for the most part blessed with the comforts without the superfluities of life. During five or six days of the week they dwelt in their own little village, among trees and fields, taking no thought of the outside world and contenting themselves with the homely gossip of their farmstead or hamlet. On market day they came into the town in shoals, clad in their quaint corduroy breeches, broad-brimmed hats, and brass-buttoned coats of antique cut, bringing their produce on pack-horses, to await the visits of the merchants—the commercial aristocracy of Leeds, then a town of some 16,000 or 17,000 inhabitants—who were the agents through which the outer world received its supply of Yorkshire woollen goods. They were a shrewd, careful race, somewhat stolid and slow of speech and not given to great mental briskness or activity, keenly appreciative of the blessings of liberty and usually in sympathy with the political party to whom the cause of liberty was for the moment entrusted; sober, godly souls for the most part; regular in their attendance at public worship, and upon the whole preferring the plebeian zeal of the Chapel to the aristocratic repose of the Church.[2]
BIRTHPLACE OF PRIESTLEY.