Faraday: The Life

In 1804, when Michael was thirteen or fourteen, he had to put his schooling behind him and begin to earn some money for the family. He found a job as an errand boy for George Riebau, a Huguenot émigré bookbinder and bookseller in Blandford Street, sixty seconds by an errand boy’s swift run from the Faraday smithy.14 As a Huguenot, Riebau was also a member of a Protestant community which, like the Sandemanians, gathered together to protect itself against external aggression. But Riebau was also an activist in radical politics. He published radical religious and political tracts, including translations of the religious writings of Emanuel Swedenborg by Robert Hindmarsh, a founder of the Swedenborgian church in London. He also wrote a memoir, now lost, of Richard Brothers (1757–1824), who claimed to be the Prince of the Hebrews and ruler of the world.15 Brothers went so far as to demand that King George III give up his crown to him, and this led to his imprisonment as a criminal lunatic. Riebau, who became known on the street as ‘Bookseller to the Prince of the Hebrews’, and may have been a Swedenborgian himself, was also a member of the subversive London Corresponding Society in the 1790s.16 So the milieu that Michael Faraday was dropped into was a hotbed of religious dissent and radicalism, an exciting but dangerous place to be, and a place where curious, difficult, intellectual, cranky and dangerous people would gather, discuss and gossip, and where there were always interesting books and pamphlets lying about.

Two contrasting influences on Faraday’s early life seem to have met with some force in Riebau’s shop: his family Sandemanianism encountered the Swedenborgian beliefs that found sympathy with Riebau. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a world-shaping genius who has been compared to Aristotle. In his earlier career in Sweden he was an eminent and highly influential scientist and inventor who wrote on chemistry, metallurgy, astronomy, natural history, geology and topics ranging wide across the landscape of natural philosophy. Then in middle life his inspiration changed direction, leading him to write profound religious works which created the philosophical foundation of a new church anticipating the second coming of Christ and the building of a New Jerusalem.17 His writings found fertile soil in England and subsequently America, but the point to be made here is that Swedenborg, who spent some of his latter years in London writing his religious philosophy, had demonstrated how one life could naturally integrate practical science with coherent religion. This would present a potent role model for any young man in the early nineteenth century whose passion for science had to negotiate a firm wall of religious dogma, and Swedenborgian thought may even have revealed to Faraday a doorway through it.

From the start, Michael was known at Riebau’s as ‘Faraday’, a formal courtesy that indicated his low status in the workshop.18 One of his first duties was to take newspapers round to Riebau’s clients early in the morning, and then, later in the day, to collect them again and take them on to somebody else. Thus did news circulate in London in the early nineteenth century. But Faraday was clearly too bright for this sort of work to satisfy him for long, and after a year or so Riebau offered him an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. His indentures were signed on 7 October 1805.19 Now he had seven years of hard work, training and extraordinary influences to look forward to, but security and companionship also, and prospects for the future. Thus his life slipped up a gear, and began to look encouraging, at exactly the same time as the outlook for the nation began to brighten when news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar on 21 October began to circulate in London by the hands of errand newsboys.

Faraday became a skilful bookbinder under Riebau’s tutelage. He learned how to trim the piles of pages sent by the printer, fold them into signatures with a folding stick and beat the folds to make them smooth and open cleanly. Then he learned how to sew the gathered signatures on to their bands – six or seven to a folio book, five to a quarto – and how to flick vermilion and sap-green pigment from a brush in a regular random pattern on the page edges. The covers came next – Riebau taught him how to cut the hides that lay in piles in the yard, and to choose the parts of the leather that were best suited for covering book boards. Faraday learned, too, how to boil wheat flour to make the glue to stick the leather to the board, and how to shave and drill the boards to fit the page bundles. The smells and sounds of the workshop entranced him, so did the tools and paraphernalia, and the heavy wooden benches, worn, bumped and rilled by years of banging and rubbing by bookbinders. The final duty to every well-bound book was to glaze its cover with two coats of beaten white of egg, polish it with a polishing iron passed hot over the glazed cover, and stamp the letters of the title in gold leaf on the spine.20

From the beginning of the apprenticeship Riebau spotted something extraordinary in Faraday – his eagerness, his fascination with the books that came for binding, his keenness to study them rather than to treat them merely as bundles of paper to be sewn. Perhaps because of this Riebau gave Faraday just that bit more encouragement than he might give to other apprentices, and gave him too some practical opportunities to follow the directions that his intellect took him. Riebau would have noticed Faraday’s exceptional physical dexterity, the nimbleness of his fingers, how he could ‘strike 1000 blows in succession [with a hammer] without resting’, and his respect for these qualities grew early in their years together.21 By the end of the apprenticeship Riebau was convinced that he had been the master of a genius, and told others so in an ‘account of the Progress of Genius in an Apprentice’, which he wrote for publication.22

Faraday read what he was binding, and having the third volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica come into his hands, was fired with enthusiasm by the ‘Electricity” article. This was no secret from Riebau, who encouraged him to make electrical instruments, and gave him the time and the space in the back of the shop to do so. Faraday read Lavoisier’s seminal treatise Elements of Chemistry, first published in English in 1790, and Conversations in Chemistry by Jane Marcet also came in for binding. With jars and cooking pots Faraday followed the experiments described by that popular author, who wrote particularly for the young. Marcet was widely admired in literary and scientific society. The writer Maria Edgeworth described her as someone ‘who had so much accurate information and who can give it out in narrative so clearly, so much for the pleasure and benefit of others without the least ostentation or mock humility’.23 Many years later Faraday recalled the impact that Jane Marcet’s writing on chemistry had had on him: ‘[it] gave me my foundation in that science … her book came to me as the full light in my mind’.24

Books were sold without covers in the early nineteenth century, and there was such a flow of material for binding through Riebau’s workshop that Faraday could not have been better placed. He read Ali Baba, saw Hogarth’s engravings,25 studied landscape engravings, portrait prints and satirical engravings by Gillray and Rowlandson. The Repository of Arts journal passed through his hands, as did the Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. These are some of the few titles that we know he handled: to skip forward a hundred years, it must have been like sitting in the British Museum Reading Room with the whole world of literature passing book by book, day by day, past your eyes. Riebau encouraged him to copy from the books, text and illustrations, and he would settle down to do this at the end of the day when his fellow apprentices went off to mess around: ‘I was a very lively, imaginative person,’ he would later write, ‘and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia. But facts were important and saved me. I could trust a fact, but always cross-examined an assertion.’26

Riebau also encouraged Faraday to travel about London to see machinery in action, such as at the new pumping stations at Holloway and Hammersmith, where steam engines had been installed, and to see extraordinary feats of construction such as the Highgate Archway. He urged him to look at works of art on exhibition at the Royal Academy at Somerset House or the British Institution in Pall Mall, and asked customers if they would do him the favour of allowing the young man to see works of art in their private collections.

Among Riebau’s customers were some of the leading artists of London. One was the miniature painter Richard Cosway, a Swedenborgian who dabbled in alchemy, mysticism and mesmerism;27 another was the architect and artist George Dance the Younger; both were art collectors and may reasonably have been among those whose collections Riebau wanted Faraday to see. The Dance family, sons and grandsons of the architect and Surveyor to the Corporation of London George Dance the Elder, had an extended family tradition and made their own influential careers variously in the creative and performing arts. George Dance the Younger was the fifth and last of the sons, his father’s pupil who became a highly influential architect and Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. Among the younger George Dance’s buildings were Newgate Prison, Lord Lansdowne’s Library in Berkeley Square and the Ionic portico of the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Having spent some years in Rome as a young man, Dance the Younger was well versed in the form and function of classical architecture, and interpreted it in his own buildings. George and the other Dances, all men of some power and influence, were variously Proprietors or Life Subscribers to the new Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.

Towards the end of 1809 the Faraday family moved from Jacob’s Mews to Weymouth Street, a two-minute run from Riebau’s shop. James Faraday’s ill-health, and the death of his landlady, which may have brought with it further complications in the tenancy, forced him to give up the blacksmithery, and he and his family appear to have exchanged the smithy for 18 Weymouth Street with another tenant.28 James died in 1810, and George Riebau took his place as the father figure to lead Michael Faraday and to broaden his outlook. One lifelong friend, the painter and inventor of optical drawing instruments Cornelius Varley, who was also briefly a member of the Sandemanian church, remembered the young Michael Faraday well: ‘he was the best bookworm for eating his way to the inside; for hundreds had worked at books only as so much printed paper. Faraday saw a mine of knowledge, and resolved to explore it.’29

As an example of the right boy being at the right place at the right time, Michael Faraday is comparable in one aspect of his upbringing with the young J.M.W. Turner. Fifteen years earlier, Turner had been a youthful presence in his father’s Covent Garden barber’s shop. The flow that energised him was not one of books, but of customers who passed through the shop and were shown watercolours by the barber’s son. ‘My son is going to be a painter,’ Turner the barber said. Equally, George Riebau’s response was that Michael Faraday’s name ‘I am fully persuaded will be well known in a few years hence’.30

As a result of Riebau’s encouragement, and the effect of the thousands of books that passed through, or near, his hands, Faraday began in 1809 a collection of ‘Notices, Occurrences, Events Etc relating to the Arts and Sciences’ which he had picked up from newspapers, reviews, magazines and so on. To this collection he gave the title, with its ring of a published collection, ‘The Philosophical Miscellany’ (its contents are listed in Appendix One). He wrote his material out neatly, illustrated it with careful pen-and-ink drawings, and indexed the whole thing. It is an omnivorous and enthusiastic gathering, a clue to the future.

In 1810, when Faraday was nineteen years old, Riebau encouraged him to go to lectures given by the teacher, philosopher and silversmith John Tatum in his house in Salisbury Court, 53 Dorset Street. Faraday’s elder brother Robert found the shilling entry fee for him.31 Tatum’s house was off the eastern end of Fleet Street, a short walk down the hill from the Sandemanian chapel, and thus on one of the Faraday family’s well-trodden routes. The lectures took place on Monday evenings in an upper room where diagrams hung on the walls, and a pair of windows stood opposite Tatum’s desk. We know this because Faraday made a detailed perspective drawing of the empty lecture room, taking it as far as the loops of string suspending the diagrams. There he made friends with other young men and women who were transfixed by the new experimental science. Some, such as Benjamin Abbott and Edward Magrath – both Quakers – and Richard Phillips, became friends for life.

Tatum’s lectures, from which Faraday took notes which he later transcribed and illustrated in detail, covered electricity, galvanism, optics, geology, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy and many other topics, the whole gamut of science, or ‘natural philosophy’. Tatum taught most of what was then known: the gap between basic and advanced scientific research was wafer-thin, and heated disagreements between savants fractured this narrow space. Tatum gave due acknowledgement to his fellow natural philosophers, as scientists were then known, including Professor Humphry Davy, Director of the Laboratory at the Royal Institution, who had demonstrated how water could be decomposed by an electrical current, and Luigi Galvani, who showed how frogs’ legs could be convulsed by an electrical charge. He would demonstrate phenomena with twenty or thirty experiments each evening, all of which Faraday described meticulously in his notes. Some of the experiments went wrong – one evening an electrical charge was too much for a frog, which flew out of its jar and hopped about the room. Other experiments surprised and shocked members of the audience: ‘If any Lady or Gentleman wishes to feel the sensation of the galvanic fluid I should be very happy to accommodate them. They must wet their hand in water and hold one ball in each … hah hah hah hah ha …’.32

After the shrieks had subsided, Tatum made some more spectacular experiments – by passing an electrical spark through a specially perforated and twisted worm of silver foil he spelt out the word SCIENCE for all to see as the finale to a lecture on Electricity.33

The lectures were often oversubscribed, with the result that Tatum had to repeat the more popular ones. One of these was ‘Optics, theory and practice’, in which he demonstrated the camera obscura and camera lucida, and showed glass transparencies of landscape and other scenes with a ‘magic lantern’. Tatum’s teaching was essentially visual and demonstrative – he did not only tell his pupils, he showed them. Perhaps using waxed, and thereby transparent, engravings after Joseph Wright of Derby and others, he projected ‘an operation on the air pump … a chemist with a pneumatic trough … a view in a mine in Derbyshire … a gentleman’s mansion’.34 The scientific education that Tatum gave was complete and fascinating, with an emphasis on what would now be called physics; rather less on chemistry. As an offshoot of the lecture series, he invited a group of the men in his audience to meet at his house every Wednesday evening to listen to and give lectures of their own.35 This became formalised in 1808 as the City Philosophical Society, whose members heard Tatum speak and who took it in turns, every other Wednesday, to lecture to the group on scientific subjects that they had studied.36

Some years after he had transcribed them, Faraday collected his notes of Tatum’s lectures together and bound them in four volumes with a fond, gracious and revealing dedication to Riebau.37 ‘Sir,’ he wrote on the dedication page,

When first I evinced a predilection for the Sciences but more particularly for that one denominated Electricity you kindly interested yourself in the progress I made in the knowledge of facts relating to the different theories in existence readily permitting me to examine those books in your possession that were any way related to the subjects then occupying my attention. [To] you therefore is to be attributed the rise and existence of that small portion of knowledge relating to the sciences which I possess and accordingly to you are due my acknowledgements.

Unused to the arts of flattery I can only express my obligations in a plain but sincere way. Permit me therefore Sir to return thanks in this manner for the many favours I have received at your hands and by your means, and believe me your grateful and Obedient Servant, M Faraday.

A close look at the way the pen runs reveals that when Faraday wrote his signature he did the ‘F’ first: thus what he actually wrote was ‘F Maraday’, the manner of his signature, with its mild form of disguise, that he practised all his life.

But long before they were dedicated and bound Riebau had already shown Faraday’s notes to ‘Mr Dance Junr. of Manchester St., who … requested to let him shew them to his Father, I did so, and the next day Mr. Dance very kindly gave [Michael Faraday] an Admission ticket to the Royal Institution Albemarle St.’38

The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, was set up and initially funded by a group of aristocrats, MPs and philanthropists who in 1799 had met to consider urgently ways of speeding the application of newly-evolving scientific principles to the betterment of life for the general population of Britain. The Institution’s mission was put into words by one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford: ‘for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical invention and improvements, and by teaching by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments the application of science to the common purposes of life’.

The ticket Faraday had been given was a pass to attend the remaining lectures in what was to be Humphry Davy’s final series there, on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. The elder ‘Mr Dance’ has been identified as the musician William Dance,39 but there is no evidence to prove this assertion. All the Dances were members of the Royal Institution, and many of them gave 17 Manchester Street as their address in the Institution Managers’ Minutes.40 The Dance who shows the strongest credentials for being the man who first gave Michael Faraday the introduction to the Royal Institution is the architect George Dance the Younger. As we shall see, it was George Dance who had a particular influence on Faraday’s understanding of classical art and architecture, fostered during his years as Riebau’s apprentice, and as a result Faraday held a lasting gratitude for him. George Dance also had, as did many people of fashion, a continuing interest in electricity, which is first recorded by the diarist Joseph Farington in 1799: ‘Hay’s Electrical Lecture I went to. – N & G Dance, – [Benjamin] West &c there …’.41 Twenty years later, when his health was ebbing, George Dance retained a faith in the healing powers of electricity. Farington reports: ‘Dance I called on. He was gone to Partington’s to be electrified. I met Miss Green who gave me a very unfavourable accnt of the state of his spirits.’42

Concurrent with his education as a young bookbinder and natural philosopher ran Faraday’s religious education. This took place at the Sandemanian chapel, led by a succession of Elders whose teaching is marked by key symbols in the margins of Faraday’s Bible.43 Very many of the pages in most of the books of the Bible, the Apocrypha excepted, are marked by Faraday’s pencil, in single, double and heavier lines denoting the relative significance of the passages to him at that time. Thus, there is evidence of detailed study of Leviticus, the book of Jewish laws and ritual, and the exhortation to obedience to God’s law in Deuteronomy 4 is well marked. The biblical foundation of Faraday’s youthful pursuit of knowledge is indicated in his firm markings in Job 28, where, at verses 1–2 he highlights:

Surely there is a vein of silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.

This follows the chapter heading: ‘There is a knowledge of natural things. But wisdom is an excellent gift of God’. At places where his own Christian name is mentioned, for example in Daniel 12.1 – ‘And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’ – Faraday has marked it clearly.

The world that Michael Faraday was introduced to at Riebau’s was wider and more dangerous than the Sandemanian clique. Another of the sophisticated outsiders who seemed to be regulars in the shop was Jean-Jacques Masquerier, who had fled Paris for England in 1792. Masquerier, who like Riebau was of Huguenot descent,44 had been born in Chelsea of French parents, but the family had returned to Paris a year after his birth. The young man had studied drawing in Paris, and having arrived in England entered the Royal Academy Schools aged fourteen in December 1792, and went on to become a fashionable portrait and history painter.

During Napoleon’s rise to power Masquerier returned to Paris where he made some secret studies of the Emperor-to-be which he used and reused in his paintings.45 He gossiped about French revolutionary politics and personalities, particularly to Joseph Farington, and in 1801 exhibited in Piccadilly a huge picture of Napoleon reviewing the consular troops. This made him £1000 profit, but it led to scandal when William Cobbett accused him of being a French spy.46 Among Masquerier’s friends in the circles around the Royal Academy at this time were the painters Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Years later, however, the poet Thomas Campbell described Masquerier in temperate, even condescending, terms as a ‘pleasant little fellow with French vivacity’,47 while the painter John Constable loathed him: ‘although he has made a fortune in the Art, he enjoys it only as a thief enjoys the fruits of his robbery – while he is not found out’.48

Masquerier’s address in the early 1800s, given in correspondence in the Crabbe Robinson Papers,49 was Edwards Street, Manchester Square. Nevertheless Silvanus Thompson, one of Faraday’s early biographers, asserts that Masquerier was at one time Riebau’s lodger, and that among Faraday’s tasks as Riebau’s apprentice was the dusting of the lodgers’ rooms and the blacking of their boots.50 However it was that they met, Masquerier liked Faraday and appreciated his brightness and talent. He lent him books on perspective and, perhaps in response to a request from Faraday and encouragement from Riebau, taught him to draw.51 The young man rapidly mastered perspective, as the drawings in the Tatum notebooks plainly show. Faraday developed a fluid line which expressed complicated structures of apparatus, wooden stands, glass tubes, connecting wires, brass rods with balls on the ends and so on, all delicate, characterful, rarefied and self-possessed instruments at the beginnings of their own evolution, constructed for particular and discrete scientific purposes.

When Riebau showed Dance the illustrated notes that Faraday had made, he was displaying him as one of his own products, a fine young bookbinder, very well trained, who was now reaching the end of his apprenticeship. He would have shown the work of all his older apprentices to influential patrons in this way, because it was to his advantage as an apprentice master that he should find good situations for his lads. George Dance, the architect of crisp, elegant buildings, and a portrait draughtsman of rare talent, was an ideal person to appreciate Faraday’s neat, informed text and illustrations. The clarity and assurance of the illustrations in particular were of such a level that Dance might reasonably have considered their creator to be a potential student of architecture.

Faraday’s early education with Riebau, Cosway, George Dance and Masquerier might have led him towards art or architecture as much as to science – the various scientific and artistic influences on him had by 1810 served to introduce him to the great breadth of contemporary culture as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. His brush with Swedenborgianism gave added coloration, though we may never know its extent or tone. His experiences of Tatum’s lectures, however, and his responses to them, were such that by the time he first set foot inside the Royal Institution to hear Humphry Davy lecture, Michael Faraday was already as well versed in science as any young man or woman of his generation could possibly be. His weaker points, however, were mathematics, which he found impossible to grasp fully, and chemistry. In Tatum’s lectures chemistry was just one of a wide range of scientific topics, and so by going to hear Davy speak on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’, Faraday would be taking his scientific knowledge to new levels.