Joseph Priestley and the Birmingham riots

Abstract Samuel Johnson regarded Joseph Priestley as a man whose theological works ‘tended to unsettle every thing, and yet settle nothing’; an opinion shared by many contemporaries. Like Priestley himself they paid more attention to those views religious and political, which by their unorthodoxy had made him obnoxious, than to those researches both chemical and physical, the merits of which when judged without bias were to replace an immediate notoriety as a controversialist by a more lasting fame as a philosopher. Priestley’s election in 1766 to Fellowship of the Royal Society is less a true indication of the general feeling towards him than the burning in 1785 at Dordrecht by the hand of the common executioner of his History of the corruptions of Christany. This antagonism towards Priestley found its fullest expression in the Birmingham Riots of 1791, when his property was destroyed by mob violence, and he himself narrowly escaped with his life.