WI Josiah Wedgewood dies in infacy?

Justin Pickard

With the early death of Josiah Wedgewood, the Wedgewood-Darwin dynasty is extinguished ... with a surprising number of butterflies:

  • An underfunded Trent-Mersey Canal takes far longer to reach completion - with potential butterflies for the industrial revolution.
  • No John Wedgewood (Josiah's son) = no Royal Horticultural Society.
  • No Josiah Wedgewood II and no Thomas Wedgewood = no funding for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is forced to support himself with noncreative work. Oh, and the removal of Thomas might also have butterflies for the development of chemical photography.
  • No Charles Darwin (a grandchild of Josiah, as was his wife and cousin, Anne)!
  • Alfred Wallace takes over as the main proponent of evolutionary theory in his paper (and later, book), On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties. Finches replaced with flying frogs.
  • Later, Wallace lends his intellectual weight to a proto-leftist reform movement started by an elderly J. S. Mill, writing extensively on trade policy and land reform. Support for women's suffrage, spiritualism, biogeography, and the necessity a fiat currency. However, his public opposition to vaccination undermines support for the smallpox vaccine ... with smallpox persisting as a realistic threat for far longer than in OTL.
  • Also, the following passage of On The Tendency of Species proves surprisingly influential:

    The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.
    Click to expand...

    Could it have political implications? Proto-socialist applications of an early systems theory? Sounds almost like cybernetics, or the equilibrium of the free market.
  • What would that have done to Karl Marx, particularly in his work on Capital?
  • Eventually, no Vaughan Williams (great-great-grandson of Josiah), with associated butterflies for classical music.

(interesting link)
 
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