  Erasmus Darwin was an early member of an informal group of free thinkers self-styled the Lunar  Society,[3]  that met regularly in Birmingham to discuss everything from the latest philosophical and scientific ideas to the latest advances in technology and industry. The Society included James Watt, Joseph Priestly and Charles Darwin’s other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood, like Erasmus Darwin, lived in Staffordshire and was in the process of developing a family pottery works into a major industrial concern by applying new scientific and technological ideas to the production of ‘china’.  The religious inclinations of the group were ‘non-conforming’ and included a number of Unitarians, a sect Erasmus Darwin referred to as ‘a featherbed to catch a falling Christian’. Looked upon with suspicion by High Church conservatives, they actively promoted in Great Britain the revolutionary philosophical, scientific and political ideas sweeping across Europe and the Americas.  Most had spent considerable time absorbing Enlightenment ideas in Edinburgh, Scotland.