Margaret Bryan

Margaret Bryan (c. 1759 – 31 March 1836) was an English natural philosopher and educator and the author of three scientific textbooks. A pioneer of female education, she taught science to women and girls from her schools in Margate and London. The first 'Bryan House' school was in Margate, Kent above the yet-to-be-discovered Margate Caves, and the second was in Blackheath, London. Margaret also later offered private tuition from Cadogan Place in Chelsea. Her first known work was A Compendious System of Astronomy, collecting her lectures on astronomy. She later published Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1806), a textbook on the fundamentals of physics and astronomy, and An Astronomical and Geographical Class Book for the Use of Schools and Private Families, a thin octavo, in 1815.

Life Although some unverified speculations appeared in 2021, personal information about Margaret Bryan was discovered when genealogical research published in 2023 uncovered many details about her life and family. Further biographical research published in 2024 revealed extensive information about the lives of Margaret, her husband William, and her two daughters, Anne Marian and Sarah Maria.

Baptized on 12 October 1759 in West Ham, Essex, Margaret was the daughter of textile merchant Oswald Haverkam and Sarah (née Wall), whose father was an apothecary. Margaret’s mother, Sarah, died in 1764, and Margaret and her siblings were put under the care of her uncle Thomas Nottidge and a second guardian, Joseph Green. Margaret's father, Oswald, remarried in 1769 and died in 1781. Margaret, then living in Chigwell, married William Bryan, a merchant, in London on 12 July 1783. They had two children, Anne Marian and Sarah Maria. and in 1806, she published her second book, Lectures on Natural Philosophy. The book was not as well received as her first and in 1807 Margaret sold her school in Blackheath and moved to 1 Gloucester Place, London. In 1813 she planned to deliver lectures to the public from her home in Bath and at the Argyll rooms in central London, though these were cancelled due to personal misfortune.

In 1797 Bryan published in quarto, by subscription, a Compendious System of Astronomy, with a portrait of herself and two daughters as a frontispiece, the whole engraved by William Nutter from a miniature by Samuel Shelley. She dedicated her book to her pupils. The lectures of which the book consisted had been praised by Charles Hutton, then at Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. An octavo edition of the work was issued later. The Critical Review printed her reply to what she saw as a damaging article in that journal. The text was supplemented with diagrams as well as portions for exercises. She described the mechanics of the air rifle, the hot air balloon, the diving bell, as well as works of Isaac Newton, Galileo, and Benjamin Franklin, including the latter's experiments with lightning.

Conversations on Chemistry, published anonymously in 1806, is also ascribed to her by Watt and in the Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors (1816), but is in fact a book by Jane Marcet.