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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’.
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’.
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,
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.’
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;
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.
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.’
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’.
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.
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 …’.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.’
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,
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.
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 …’.
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.’
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.
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,
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.
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.
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’,
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’.
Masquerier’s address in the early 1800s, given in correspondence in the Crabbe Robinson Papers,
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.
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.
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.
CHAPTER 2 Humphry Davy (#ulink_66e7f048-9630-59d8-866d-41e3aa857241)
Humphry Davy was a star. Buckles flew, stays popped, and the ostrich feathers worn by some of those who came to show themselves off in the crush at the Royal Institution lectures were apt to end the event as bedraggled zigzags. That, at least, is the impression given by Gillray’s 1802 engraving of a lecture-demonstration at the Royal Institution. One thousand and more men and women crammed the theatre at 21 Albemarle Street, a converted eighteenth-century townhouse, when Davy was billed to lecture on geology, agriculture or tanning leather.
These were exciting subjects – the new knowledge about the nature and material of the earth and how to harvest it efficiently was beginning to broaden people’s horizons – and when the young and handsome Humphry Davy took the stand, ladies and gentlemen of society were hot, breathless, early and hushed. Celebrated actors like Young or Kemble had the coveted asterisk printed beside their names on theatre bills, and were Humphry Davy a professional actor – though a distinguished performer he was nonetheless – he too would have merited the star.
Michael Faraday knew all about Davy’s reputation. He had written up some of Davy’s ideas in his ‘Philosophical Miscellany’; Tatum spoke of Davy, and the word on the street would have intrigued a boy so engaged by science. The puzzle is why he left it so long to take steps to attend Davy’s lectures. Albemarle Street is much nearer to Weymouth Street than is Fleet Street, so distance was not a factor. The reason may have been financial: Tatum’s series at a shilling a time was perhaps all the Faraday family could afford. But more than that, there was a wide social gulf between the apprentice bookbinder and the great and the good who flocked to the Royal Institution, and Faraday may have been reluctant to cross it. Stories emerged about how Davy packed the Royal Institution lecture theatre to the rafters, how the audience hung on his every word and clapped and cheered him when he exploded a model volcano, or filled the theatre with thick, stinking smoke from a bubbling retort, or – best of all – took a man from the audience and gave him the new Laughing Gas, nitrous oxide, from a silk bag and tube and made him chuckle and jump about, and cry with intoxicated pleasure.
News of the Laughing Gas had followed Davy from Bristol, where he had first made his name, and where he had carried out vivid experiments with it. The poet Robert Southey had reported that when he breathed a bagful of the gas in the laboratory in Bristol, ‘I immediately laughed. The laugh was involuntary but highly pleasurable, accompanied by a thrill all through me; and a tingling in my toes and fingers, a sensation perfectly new and delightful.’
The antiquary Henry Wansey could only compare the sensations he had felt when breathing the gas with ‘some of the grand choruses in the Messiah’, played on ‘the united power of 700 instruments’.
Other reports spoke of staggering, running about laughing, happiness, vertigo and a longing for more, so it is no wonder that London audiences were agog to try it, or see it in action. Gillray’s engraving Scientific Researches! – New Discoveries in PNEUMATICKS! …, which shows nitrous oxide being administered, suggests that the gas also made the patient fart spectacularly, but that may just have been Gillray’s personal contribution to scientific research.
Davy had youth, simplicity of manner, a natural lilting eloquence with a soft Cornish burr which had been in his voice since his childhood in Penzance. He had a piercing eye that held an audience as if it were one person, and a fresh-faced healthy look about him which charmed his listeners. ‘He was generally thought naturally graceful,’ wrote the tanner Thomas Poole, who had known Davy in Bristol, ‘and the upper part of his face was beautiful.’
He had a winning smile, and when off the podium his conversation was buoyant, animated, cheerful, happy; because of this he was eagerly sought for soirées and dinners in town and country.
The portrait painter Martin Archer Shee RA, who was deeply involved in Royal Academy politics, was one of Davy’s hosts. Another was Sir George Beaumont, a powerful art patron and arbiter of taste, whose strongly-expressed opinions influenced the policies of the Royal Academy and the Royal Institution. Others who entertained Davy included Lord de Dunstanville, the Cornish mine-owner and patron of art and science, and William Smith, MP for Norwich, a Unitarian and a campaigner for political reform. With hosts at this level of society, Davy had arrived, and despite his provincial background he became so popular that receptions were considered incomplete without him. Joseph Farington, whose social and political connections ran like veins through the establishment, met Davy on the circuit, and in his diary he recreated the ebb and flow of the conversations. Gossip flowed freely. At a dinner with the Beaumonts in November 1806 the host complained of Canon Sydney Smith’s ‘levity and indifference in his manner’.
Sydney Smith, a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, who lectured on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution, made jokes and throwaway remarks which, Beaumont felt, were ‘ill-suited’. Beaumont may also have been giving a veiled warning to Davy, encouraging him to adopt a formal, even seemly manner of lecturing, not the wild antics that Gillray had satirised in the widely circulated Scientific Researches engraving. Davy responded by further criticising Smith, whose Whig allegiances irked Beaumont’s Tory table: ‘Smith is not reckoned to have much reading,’ Davy offered, ‘or extensive information, but [he] has talent and is now well received at Holland House and may probably be a Bishop.’ As the subjects changed, Davy went on to chat about Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France, and her fortune-teller’s warning that she would suffer a violent death. Recalling years later Davy’s first appearances in London society, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon reported a feeling that ‘High Life’ had ruined Davy, and the ambitious young lawyer Henry Brougham remarked that Davy ‘had the supreme folly of giving up [his] original and natural liberal opinions for love of Lords and Ladies’.
But this was 1806; the ruination had not yet set in.
Even in the far north of England, at Cockermouth in the Lake District, when Farington stayed with the newly-created Lord Lonsdale, talk turned to that ‘ingenious young man’ Humphry Davy. The Bishop of Carlisle, Samuel Goodenough, was present, and he, complaining of Richard Watson, who besides being non-resident Bishop of Llandaff was a Fellow of the Royal Society and had invented an improved type of gunpowder, said that Davy had ‘more chemical knowledge in his little finger than Watson had in his whole body’.
Davy careered through accepted wisdom in science in the first ten years of the nineteenth century, and when that decade was out he had transformed human understanding of chemistry and its applications. His first great triumphs were his discoveries in electrolysis, which he expounded to his fellow scientists at the Royal Society in the Bakerian Lecture, the most prestigious annual lecture in science, in November 1806. This caused excitement far afield, and led the Institut de France in Paris to award him the following year its medal, and three thousand francs, for the most progressive work in electricity. The driving force behind this prize, open to scientists of all nations, was the Emperor Napoleon himself; but because of the war with France, Davy could not collect it until 1813. Davy went on to isolate and identify potassium (1807), and to show that chlorine was an element (1810), thus setting two of the foundation stones in chemistry which had to be laid before there could be any semblance of progress into a modern world.
In his late twenties, Davy was naturally considered a young man by all the ancient insiders whom he met at social gatherings, and he became part of their gossip. When he fell seriously ill in 1807 Farington expressed his concern in his diary: ‘Davy of the Royal Institution is in a dangerous state, a low fever, pulse 120, drinks a bottle of wine a day. Has lately discovered in Chemistry what oversets Lavoisier’s System.’9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Concern for Davy’s health was also shown by many of the thousands of people who had been led towards enlightenment by his teaching, and to keep them informed the Royal Institution Managers published regular bulletins at 21 Albemarle Street on the progress of the Professor’s illness.
Despite his exposed public persona, Davy saw the lectures he gave as a distraction from his main purpose as a researcher into natural philosophy.
Nevertheless, he prepared them in great detail, reporting immediately on his latest discoveries and their relevance, and writing each lecture afresh for each occasion. Very little was repeated, so the same audience could attend, season after season, without being wearied. The evening before he was to perform, he would rehearse the lecture to his assistants, prepare the equipment and illustrations he was going to need, mark his text for emphasis and intonation, and go to his room early with a light fish supper.
Davy’s rooms on the second floor of the Royal Institution lacked any kind of personal touch in the furniture and furnishings. He had merely moved into them as his predecessor as Professor of Chemistry at the Institution, Thomas Young, had left them, and he fitted himself in around the furniture. He did, however, make the rooms his own in the way he spread his papers about. Tables, chairs and the floor were littered with papers. Open a cupboard and more tumbled out. Open a side door, and there was a pile there too. The only visible object that was truly elegant and certainly Davy’s own was a little porcelain figure of Venus, made and given to him by his friend and early collaborator Thomas Wedgwood. Although he was a prolific letter writer, Davy tended to receive more letters than he wrote, and he could not stop them coming. He received compliments, invitations and dedicated verses, one coming with a gift of a fob for his watch chain from an admirer who asked him to wear it at the next lecture as a sign that he had received her poem.
The considered female view was that ‘those eyes were made for something besides poring over crucibles’.
His brother John, twelve years his junior, who idolised Humphry and studied chemistry with him, lived at the Royal Institution from 1808 to 1811. There he remembered lying in bed listening through the thin partition to Humphry settling down for the night, rustling and shifting, and ‘in a loud voice, reciting favourite passages in prose or verse, or declaiming some composition of his own, or humming some angler’s song’.
To Davy, as to the Romantics of his generation, science, literature and art were intertwined, part of a creative whole which enveloped the universe. He practised what he believed, and wrote poetry which drew heavily on landscape imagery and romantic travel for its subject matter and inspiration, and echoed in form and ambition the poems of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a passionate, even obsessive, fisherman, and made his own tackle and sets of hooks, with thread and bits of highly coloured feather as flies for trout fishing. Hanging in one of his cupboards was the bizarre green cloth fisherman’s suit he designed for himself, ‘with pockets everywhere for tackle, caoutchouc boots reaching to the knees. A coal heaver’s hat dyed green, and studded with artificial flies. He looked not like an inhabitant of the earth, and yet he was on’t.’
He was a keen shot too: ‘For shooting he wore a hat covered in scarlet cloth so he wouldn’t be shot at.’
It was not long before Davy, always attracted by the highly-coloured feather, became caught on a hook himself. During the course of 1810 he met Mrs Jane Apreece, a Scottish widow two years younger than him. Jane Apreece was ambitious, sharp-witted, imperious, grand, but sparkling and mysterious, with a hint of a past. There was an unfounded rumour that she was the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), an allegorical tale of nationalism and female creativity centred on the liberated Corinne, poet, artist and symbol of a united Italy. The book had been an immediate sensation, and upset the comfortable notion of woman as a retiring, domestic creature. Although Jane had met Madame de Staël when she travelled on the continent with her late husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, the connection is unlikely; but Mrs Apreece will have taken the compliment. Apreece was the heir to a baronetcy, but he had died in 1807 before attaining the title that he and his wife had anticipated. Jane, however, took that in her stride. She had plenty of money of her own. She was an only child, and the heiress of her father Charles Kerr, a merchant in Antigua, dealing in sugar and spices, who had himself died in 1796.
Shuckburgh Apreece’s death gave his widow a new release. She moved to Edinburgh, where she set up a salon for the intellectual society of the Scottish enlightenment. She was much more widely travelled than her Edinburgh contemporaries, and dazzled them with her sophistication and gossip. Sir Henry Holland, the fashionable doctor, became light-headed at her memory, mysteriously saying that she ‘vivified [her circle] with certain usages new to the habits of Edinburgh life … The story was current of a venerable professor seen stooping in the street to adjust the lacing of her boot.’
Jane Apreece also kept abreast of London society. Farington discovered that she had an income ‘reported to be 3 or £4000 a year’,
a piece of gossip he had heard from the watercolour painter William Wells, who had himself picked it up at dinner one evening in March 1812 from his host William Blake of Portland Place.
Blake’s neighbour was Jane Apreece’s mother, Mrs Jane Kerr, and the two ladies were fellow guests that evening; also of the party was Humphry Davy. The roundabout of chit-chat gave another turn when Farington added that Davy ‘pays much attention to Mrs Apreece who is proud to have him in her train … it is not believed that she will marry him’.
The relationship gave much amusement. Sydney Smith spoke of a new chemical salt, ‘Davite of Apreece’, and an anonymous verse, quoted by a gossip who had spent three weeks in Herefordshire with Jane, included the lines:
To the Institution then she came,
And set her cap at little Davy;
He in an instant caught the flame
Before Sir Harry said an Ave;
Then, quick as turmeric or litmus paper
An acid takes, begins to vapour;
And, fast as sparks of fire and tinder,
Was burned, poor fellow, to a cinder.
Whether or nor Jane Apreece had any effect on it, Humphry Davy’s creativity reached new heights in autumn 1811 when he began to set out a history of chemistry, and its progress from ancient Egypt to his own day. This sped on into a full survey of what chemistry is, what the elements are, and how they can be brought into being and manipulated. In a sentence Davy was able to evoke the vast and minuscule, diverse and unified, teeming and vacant, interdependent, entire and bubbling thing that is the planet we live on.
The forms and appearances of the beings and substances of the external world are almost infinitely various, and they are in a state of continued alteration: the whole surface of the earth even undergoes modifications: acted on by moisture and air, it affords the food of plants; an immense number of vegetable productions arise from apparently the same materials; one species of animal matter is converted into another; the most perfect and beautiful of the forms of organised life ultimately decay, and are resolved into inorganic aggregates; and the same elementary substances, differently arranged, are contained in the inert soil, or bloom and emit fragrance in the flower, or become in animals the active organs of mind and intelligence.
This was the language of Davy’s lectures, and the language, as it was now flooding out, of his writing. As each chapter was completed he sent it to the printer, who typeset it for publication in days.
There was no fair copy, no revision; it was a stream out of the rock. On Saturday, 25 January 1812, to great public acclaim, Davy began a new series of lectures, straight out of this new writing, billed as ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. This was to be his final series at the Royal Institution, and his life was about to change. He had decided that his teaching phase was over, that he would resign as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and that from now on he would devote himself to travel, research, fishing, reflective writing, poetry and life as an influential figurehead in the development of science in London.
The first lecture considered the history of chemistry; the second the forms of matter. The audiences crammed into the theatre as word of the lectures spread, and as it became known by talk in coffee houses and drawing rooms that this was to be Humphry Davy’s final series. Davy would have been able to recognise people despite the crush, and where they sat as the lectures progressed – George Dance, for example, had a regular seat in the gallery over the clock
– and perhaps Jane, smiling at him and slowly waving her fan, was in the ladies’ section in the gallery.
By the time he had reached the sixth lecture, on Radiant Matter, 29 February, Leap Year’s Day, the audience had become an old friend, a familiar pattern of faces and attitudes spread out with neat variations like a carpet before him. There was a settling hush; the audience breathed, coughed, muttered and moved vaguely, shifting in expectation as Davy came in from the back and stood behind the speaker’s desk. He put his hand on a large lens on a brass stand and moved it a few inches to the left. A vacuum pump he moved slightly to the right. At the far end of the bench was a wooden stand about three feet high with an arm holding a bowl of glowing charcoal near the top, an empty pan near the bottom, and enclosing them both a pair of concave mirrors, like cymbals held wide and about to be clashed together by a bandsman. He gazed about the auditorium, took a deep breath and began to speak. The words flew from him – this lecture was about light, its source and radiance, its reflection and refraction, the way prisms and mirrors can transmit, split and reunite it, the discoveries of Newton, Wollaston and William Herschel. The audience was in his hand from his first utterance as his eyes swept over them and he addressed first one section, then another, then a third, and leant this way then that for emphasis.
When Davy looked up to check his time, he probably did not notice, sitting beside George Dance in the balcony above the clock, a young man with curly brown hair, a black worsted suit and a stock at his neck. On his knees the young man had a tall black hat, and on top of the hat some folds of paper and a pencil. He was attending very carefully to what Davy was saying, taking notes and watching the performance with eager interest. This young man was Michael Faraday. He watched carefully as Davy ran beams of rainbow light from one end of the bench to the other. White light came out of a lamp on the speaker’s left, was focused into a prism, split into rainbow colours, twisted this way and that by other lenses and prisms, and then back again as white light to illuminate a sheet of card. A stray rainbow beam broke out of this neat arrangement of paraphernalia to strike out across the theatre and land on the wall above Michael Faraday’s head. Then Davy turned to the stand with the concave mirrors. An assistant blew on the pan of charcoal with a pair of bellows, and the twigs glowed bright red. Davy adjusted the lower, smaller pan, and sprinkled some black powder into it. He hesitated, and as he did so the lower pan exploded with a flash and a violent hiss, scattering burning debris onto the bench and causing a sudden shriek of surprise from the audience, followed by silence, then embarrassed laughter. Davy paused before addressing the audience: ‘It is evident that in this experiment the whole of the effect must take place by the radiated heat for none can descend by other means from the pan of coals to the powder.’
As the lecture series progressed, Davy might have become aware of the young man above the clock. Faraday did not attend all the lectures, just four out of the ten, but not only did he take notes, which he wrote out again at home in the neatest copperplate hand, he also made drawings of the apparatus Davy had used.
This will have taken him down to the demonstration table after the lecture had ended to get a closer look, and if Davy had not spoken to the young man there and then, he might at least have been aware of a presence.
Humphry Davy and Jane Apreece justified the gossips, for on 11 April 1812 they were married in Jane’s mother’s drawing room, by the Bishop of Carlisle himself. ‘I am the happiest of men,’ Davy wrote to his own mother shortly before the wedding, ‘in the hope of union with a woman equally distinguished for virtues, talents and accomplishments … I believe I should never have married, but for this charming woman, whose views and whose tastes coincide with my own, and who is eminently qualified to promote my best efforts and objects in life.’
The wedding day was the culmination of an extraordinary week. At a levée at St James’s Palace on the Wednesday the Prince Regent knighted Humphry Davy; on the Friday Davy gave his final lecture, on Metals, to echoing cheers, and on the Saturday he was married. If either one of the couple echoed the character of Corinne, adored by the Roman throng when she was crowned for her poetry, it was not Jane, but Humphry. Sitting up behind the clock on the evening of 10 April, Michael Faraday heard the newly created Sir Humphry Davy conclude his lectures at the Royal Institution with words which went to the heart of why it was that scientists did what they did, and how, by experiment, they could discover answers from nature. Davy’s words also touched on his own personal happiness and fulfilment, and added fire to Faraday’s determination to give his life to experimental science:
Experiment is as it were, the chain that binds down the Proteus of nature, and obliges it to confess its real form and divine origin. The laws that govern the phenomena of chemistry, produce invariable results; which may be made the guide of operations in the arts; and which insure the uniformity of the systems of nature, the arrangements of which are marked by creative intelligence, and made constantly subservient to the production of life, and the increase of happiness.
According to John Davy, Sir Humphry was back in his laboratory within days of his marriage.
In June he gave a paper to the Royal Society, and in July he and Lady Davy set off for the Highlands of Scotland. Sir Humphry proposed to spend his time there fishing and shooting, but, with his portable chemical apparatus securely stowed in the carriage, he also went prepared to analyse earth or rock samples, or carry out whatever chemical experiments might move him while he and his wife were away. They planned to return to London in December.
CHAPTER 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells (#ulink_6cc08fa0-ef33-542c-ad47-d51e7b63441f)
In the summer of 1812, cool and wet according to reports,
Faraday stayed in London, looking urgently for a job in science. There were six months left of his apprenticeship with George Riebau; two weeks after his twenty-first birthday he would be out on his own – with no job and no money unless he got on with it and found a position. But skilled as he had become over the past seven years with Riebau, Faraday knew that bookbinding would never satisfy him for life. Ever since he had first heard Tatum lecture, had seen the encyclopedias, the books on galvanism, optics, perspective, electricity and all the philosophies that reveal the workings of nature, and yet more since he had witnessed the revelations of fact in Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures, he was determined on a life in science.
