Faraday: The Life
Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday are connected for all time as teacher and pupil, master and assistant, milord and valet, tyrant and subject. From a perspective of two hundred years, however, they stand at equal but separate stature. Michael Faraday’s upbringing, with its twin constraints of impending poverty and strict religion, had a third ingredient of tight urban boundaries. Unlike Davy, who roamed the Cornish moors as a youth and declaimed poetry into the winds, Faraday did not see a moor, or any wild space, or much green, until he travelled abroad with his master. Davy wrote poetry, and had friends among poets, and his interconnected lifelong series of personal quests for discovery began through his poetic writing as he divined the nature of the earth and his place in it. The core of his achievement is in the isolating, naming and proving of unique entities – nitrous oxide, chlorine, potassium, iodine, the Davy Lamp – each a link in a chain. By the time he died in 1829 he was separated from the culture to which he had contributed so much by illness, distance and attitude. His final years, spent apart from his wife and wandering in Europe, found him speaking largely to himself in a series of visionary writings about travel, the rise and fall of civilisations, interplanetary voyaging and fishing. Davy was a man of the early Romantic movement – prodigious, interrogative, eye-catching and original are words that illuminate him.
In the late summer of 1813 Sir Humphry and Lady Davy laid plans for a tour, lasting perhaps two or three years, to France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and thence into Greece and Turkey. The first object was to enable Davy to collect the medal awarded him by the Emperor Napoleon and the Institut de France for his electrochemistry. This itself had been the cause of controversy, of accusations of treating with the enemy. Davy wrote to Thomas Poole:
Some people say I ought not accept this prize; and there have been foolish paragraphs in the papers to that effect; but if two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not. That would indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should rather, through the instrumentality of men of science, soften the asperities of national hostility.64
Along the route Davy planned to meet, talk and experiment with the continental scientists with whom he had corresponded. Though Britain was at war with France, Davy, a scientist renowned in France and now honoured by Napoleon, obtained a passport for himself and his party. This comprised his wife, her lady’s maid, his Flemish valet La Fontaine, a footman, and Michael Faraday as Davy’s assistant. Sir Humphry had not had personal staff before, this was an introduction of Jane’s: a man in his position must have a valet. A few days before departure, however, the valet’s wife refused to let her husband go to Boney’s France for so long, and Faraday was asked to do his job, with the promise that Davy would hire a replacement in Paris. Attending to Sir Humphry’s personal needs was not quite what Faraday had bargained for, but he could hardly refuse and risk being left behind.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow about 1 o’clock,’ Faraday wrote briefly to Benjamin Abbott early in October, perhaps to give him the news,65 and on 13 October 1813 the party of five set off.
CHAPTER 4 ‘The Glorious Opportunity’
At eleven o’clock on that crisp autumn morning the coach rolled off from the Davys’ house in Grosvenor Street. Sir Humphry and Lady Davy and the lady’s maid travelled inside the shining black carriage; Michael Faraday and the footman were outside, on the roof, with the driver. Those three had to stand all the force of the weather, but they also got the fresh air and the view, and for Faraday this was central to his enjoyment of the journey and his record of it.
In one of the fullest and most exciting travel documents of the period, Faraday wrote a long account of his tour with the Davys.1 The peculiarity of the Journal is not only its detail or its length – nearly four hundred pages of Faraday’s fluent hand, whippy, spiky letterforms, sloping elegantly to the right – but its purpose and arrangement. The volume contains descriptions of two extended tours made by Faraday, the first to Europe from October 1813 until April 1815, the second to south Wales in 1819. The accounts blend into one another: on page 46 the continental diary breaks off in mid-sentence and, after a blank sheet or two, dives straight into 150 pages on the Welsh trip. Then the continental journey takes over again, with a description of the Parisian water supply, and leads us for a six-month dance through France, over the Alps, down to Genoa, Turin, Florence, Siena and Rome, where it cuts off again in mid-sentence, this time finally. A diary of the subsequent months of the journey, to Naples, back to Rome, into Switzerland and Germany, and back to Italy again before returning home is now lost, but long extracts were published in Henry Bence Jones’s biography of Faraday in 1870.2
The document that we have must be a second version, written up from initial notes, at home in some of the long evenings before Faraday married in 1821.3 A pencil note inside the front cover gives his reasons for writing the diary:
This journal is not intended to mislead or to inform or to convey even an imperfect idea of what it speaks. The sole use is to recall to my mind at some future time the things I see now and the most effectual way to that will be I conceive to write down be they good or bad or however imperfect my present impressions.
The keeping of the diary was thus Faraday’s attempt to grapple with the chronic memory loss which dogged him from his youth in bouts and flashes, an inability to recall anything from common events to complex thoughts, and which would lead him to deep melancholia and threaten at times to destroy his career. This also drove his compulsion, encouraged by Isaac Watts’s advice, to take detailed notes, and to write them up – from John Tatum’s and Humphry Davy’s lectures, and from his own laboratory experiments. The deliberate and full process of laboratory notes that Faraday practised and introduced as a standard for all scientists thereafter derived not so much from a desire to record, as from his deep-seated and desperate fear of forgetting.
Everything Faraday writes of the days on the move comes from the elevated perspective of the top of the carriage, is bathed in the light of day, and swings with the rhythm of the coach. He was apprehensive when they set off – quite naturally, for as he wrote in his opening paragraphs, he had never before ‘within my recollection’ been further than twelve miles from London. ‘But curiosity has frequently incurred dangers as great as these and therefore why should I wonder at it in the present instance.’4 ‘This morning formed a new epoch in my life,’ he mused, as he awaited the fresh curving landscapes and the insights to come.
The party trotted off along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner, through Kensington and west towards Hammersmith and Kew. Their destination that evening was Amesbury, north of Salisbury, eighty-five miles away along what is now the A30. At the comfortable pace of ten miles per hour, with a change of horses at Basingstoke, they should have made it before nightfall. The next morning was cooler, probably cloudy. They skirted the edge of Salisbury Plain, seeing Stonehenge across the fields, but made all speed for Exeter, where they ‘arrived rather late and put up for the night’, Faraday wrote. ‘I have before me at this time the Cathedral but it is too dark to see it distinctly.’5
If the first two days’ journey was a novelty for Faraday, the third was a revelation: ‘Reached Plymouth this afternoon. I was more taken by the scenery today than by anything else I have ever seen. It came upon me unexpectedly and caused a kind of revolution in my ideas respecting the nature of the earth’s surface.’6
The first sight of Dartmoor and the journey round its southern edge had been the jolt that, by his own admission, first took Faraday out of the limited horizons of London, into the beginnings of a new world view. No amount of reading of Ali Baba or of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had prepared him for it: ‘The mountainous nature of the country continually put forward new forms and objects and the landscape changed before the eye more rapidly than the organ could observe it. This gave me some ideas of the pleasures of travelling and have [sic] raised my expectations to future enjoyments to a very high point.’7 Appetite whetted, Faraday and the party retired to bed at the Commercial Inn in Plymouth: ‘Travelling I take it is fatiguing work but perhaps a little practice will enable one to bear it better.’
It was in Plymouth that Faraday’s Journal, and his journey, really began. What survives of the manuscript is a narrative of eighteen months’ adventure by an extraordinarily receptive young man who has been lifted by accident, perseverance and a succession of events from the humdrum life of a bookbinder’s apprentice to stand beside the greatest man of science of the day. There was pain with the pleasure, for although Sir Humphry Davy was instructive and sympathetic to his assistant, and had undoubtedly answered his questions about the geology of Devonshire, he was changeable, and could be vain, high-handed, and overly deferential to his difficult wife. For her part, Lady Davy was snappy and irritable, particularly to the servants, and especially to Faraday. Until the promised replacement for the absent valet came in Paris, Faraday had some extra duties to perform. There was Sir Humphry’s shaving to attend to, the laying out of his clothes in the mornings, the ascertaining of proper standards in the hotels and inns they stayed at, the marshalling of the hotel staff and other servants, and the disposal of the contents of his master’s nightly piss-pots, a chemistry lesson in itself.
They had hoped to leave Plymouth the morning after their arrival on a cartel, a ship licensed to ply between countries at war, carrying messages, essential mail, and prisoners for exchange. But the wind was too high, had been for several days, and had generated an ‘enormous swell of waters which comes rolling in from the Atlantic ocean’.8 This was Faraday’s first sight of the sea. Its strength surprised and entranced him, and over the next few days he observed it with the eye of a natural scientist. The ship’s captain, however, was observing it with a sailor’s eye, and the following day, Sunday, 17 October, he warned the party that having dismantled and loaded the carriage and stowed the luggage, they should come on board to prepare to leave at a moment’s notice. This may have been the first time that Faraday had failed to attend a meeting at the Sandemanian chapel on the Sabbath, and as the continental journey unrolls it becomes clear that he is not as fully committed to the Sandemanianism of his parents as we might expect. He is at best semi-detached, and allows himself to come close to the pleasures of worldly temptation. His first cultural shock came, however, before leaving Plymouth, when he and the party found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly caught in one of the practices of Jewish law that he had read about in Leviticus.
Davy needed to change some money into francs, but as it was the ninth day of the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles the money-changers in Plymouth refused to do business until after sunset. So the captain devised a charade. He put his watch forward, closed the shutters, lit some candles and assured the money-changers that, yes, the sun had now set, and they really did need to change their money and set sail for France on the tide. ‘He would have prevailed,’ wrote Faraday, spotting the transparent collusion between the captain and the money-changers. But just as a money-changer was ‘about to take the bag out of his pocket, his wife came and to his sorrow told him the hour. And as she knew that he then knew it, he patiently and we impatiently waited until the sun was beneath the horizon.’9
While this went on, the captain sailed the ship out of the harbour on the evening tide, and lay waiting in the Sound. With time ticking away, Sir Humphry and his party changed their money, pocketed their francs, jumped into a little boat at the quay, sailed with all speed to catch the cartel and clambered breathlessly aboard.
There was a good swell running that night. The Davys had a cabin, but Faraday stayed on deck, pacing up and down, sitting wrapped in a blanket, leaning on the rail, drinking it all in. His excitement at the new experience of the wind in his face on a night sea voyage rises up out of his Journal. What he writes has a youthful, prosaic directness about it which engages and endears. His impressions are still very present nearly two hundred years later, and we breathe the sea-salt with him. Early in the voyage he is entranced by the phosphorescence shining in the water as the ship’s bow cuts through the waves; he has ‘a fine opportunity of observing the luminous appearance of the sea and was amused by it for a long time. The prow … seemed to turn up a vast number of luminous bodies about the size of peas.’10
As day came on and the light increased, Faraday captured the roll of the sea, the rise and fall of the ship, the distance of the far horizon, and the cold green darkness of the wave troughs. A French privateer passed by, a speck in the distance, but although the captain did his best to point it out to him, Faraday could not spot it. There was nothing to be seen ‘except sky and immense waves striding one after the other at a considerable distance. These as they came to us lifted up our small vessel and gave us when on their summits a very extended horizon, but we soon sank down into the valleys between them and had nothing in view but the wall of waters around us.’11
They made landfall at Morlaix on the Brittany coast too late in the evening to disembark, so had to anchor and spend ‘another night tossed about on the waters. The evening was very fine but cold. I found the deck however a better place than the cabin.’12
When he first saw France Faraday had pangs of ‘regret for home’, intermingled with fear and apprehension. At eleven o’clock in the morning they sailed past the guard ship, their flag of truce flying,13 and came to anchor in the harbour. There they had to wait, writing letters home and amusing themselves with the cabin boy’s banter, until an official was ready to come aboard to give permission to land. The sudden arrival of an enemy ship in a small French port was a significant event, and the local officials needed time to prepare themselves, agree procedure and puff themselves up. This was a big day in Morlaix. They may not have known that the ship’s party included the great natural philosopher Sir Humphry Davy and his entourage, landing with a passport approved by Napoleon himself. The functionaries gathered themselves together, and ‘late in the afternoon the mighty man of office came attended by several understrappers and a barge full of Frenchmen apparently beggars and porters’.
Everybody was questioned and thoroughly searched. Faraday had his hat removed by an official, and it was patted and prodded and inspected, and laid carefully on the deck. Then he was frisked, and his pockets and clothes inspected. He had to take off his shoes so that the officials could ensure there were no secret messages stuffed into them. He was found to be clean – they all were – and they were allowed to pass. But the letters they had written as they waited in the harbour were confiscated, and they were firmly told that they were not permitted to write home about their arrival and reception in France. If they were caught doing so, they risked arrest as spies.
The order was given to unload the party’s carriage and luggage, and
immediately the crew of Frenchmen pounced on them and conveyed them in every direction and by the most awkward and irregular means into the barge alongside, and this with such an appearance of hurry and bustle, such an air of business and importance and yet so ineffectually that sometimes nine or ten men would be round a thing of a hundred pounds weight, each most importantly employed, and yet the thing would remain immovable until the crew were urged by their officer or pushed by the cabin boy.14
Released of its cargo and passengers, the cartel sailed for home, and ‘with no pleasurable feeling’, Faraday watched it go. By now the loaded barge was stuck in the mud as the tide flowed out. So they waited some more, and as the evening drew on Faraday watched the same phosphorescence that he had seen out at sea becoming visible in the ebb tide, rising and falling in brightness, disappearing and reappearing. When the waters rose again they felt the barge creaking and shifting heavily, and beginning to make a quiet way upriver between high wooded banks in the moonlight. They landed at the town quay, took essential luggage with them, and were led on foot through filthy streets to the only hotel in Morlaix. They thought that this could not possibly be the place, as a horse wandered idly through the front door. But, yes, this was it – ‘one of the dirtiest pig-sties I ever saw … I sat down without consideration in a very hungry plight for supper. It was clean and with my appetite its quality was no object, and being also considerably fatigued I had no difficulty in going to sleep, though singularly accommodated.’15
After breakfast in the unspeakable hotel, they went down quickly to the Customs House where their belongings had been taken. They waited ‘patiently or otherwise for some time looking on our things but not daring to touch them. At last business commenced.’16
The local soldiery marched up and formed a ragged line on the edge of the quay. Then thirty or forty inhabitants of Morlaix tumbled chattering out of the town and down the steps to help unload the belongings of this exotic party that had just blown in – enemy English, civilian, finely dressed and seemingly immune from touch of the law. Banging, bumping and crashing, the crowd leapt into the barge, ‘seized some one thing, some another and conveyed them to the landing place above … destitute of all method and regularity. It seemed as if a parcel of thieves was scampering away with what was not their own.’17
The townsfolk had the greatest difficulty with the carriage. There were no cranes on the quay so they had to heave its bits up, chassis and cabin swaying dangerously amidst the muddle of willing hands. With the carriage waiting in pieces, all the travellers’ possessions were taken into the Customs House and laid out, with a soldier posted at every door. First the carriage was searched, ‘all the corners and crannies for what they could find and thumped over every part of [it] to discover hollow and secret places’.18 Then, ‘disappointed in their hopes of booty from the carriage’, they came inside and started on the luggage. ‘They seemed determined to make up for their loss here. Package after package was opened, roll after roll unfolded, each pair of stockings unwrapped and each article of apparel shaken.’19
Again they found nothing suspicious, but confiscated two or three dozen new cotton stockings for good measure. Davy, who had restrained himself for long enough, now lost patience. The stockings were theirs; they were marked with their names; they needed them for the journey. Perhaps threats followed, and if they had no effect, a bribe did the trick. ‘At last the business ended with everything in the possession of the rightful owners, and a gift to the officers for their polite attentions.’20
So the workforce got on with the business of reassembling the carriage. They had none of the proper tools, just brute force and glimmering common sense: ‘’tis true they made the job appear a mighty one, but they got through it, and after having exclaimed “levez, levez” for an hour or two everything was in a moveable state and horses being tied to, we proceeded in order to the Hotel’.21
If they had hoped to be on their way directly, they were disappointed. Just one more formality, messieurs, mesdames. The Governor of the town had to check with Paris, ‘to learn whether the government continues in the same mind as now, that they were in when they sent Sir H Davy his passport to England. If it does not we of course are prisoners.’22
It took another day for the good news to get back from Paris to Morlaix, and for the party to be cleared for onward travel. In the meantime Faraday had time to walk about.
I cannot refrain from calling this place the dirtiest and filthiest imaginable. The streets are paved from house to house with small sharp stones, no particular part being appropriated to foot passengers. The kennels are full of filth and generally close to the house. The places [squares] and corners are occupied by idle loiterers who clothed in dirt stand doing nothing.23
Horses, pigs (the strangest kind of pig, more like greyhounds, Faraday thought), poultry, human beings ‘or whatever has connection with the [hotel] or the stables and pigsties beyond’ passed indiscriminately through. This was the same everywhere in the town. Idlers, beggars and nondescripts hung about the fires in the hotel’s kitchens, chatting and getting in the way. There was an extraordinary mixture of luxury and squalor: ‘on the left of the passage is a dining room ornamented with gilded chairs, tables and frames, but with broken windows and stone floors … [and] if pigs do not go upstairs at least animals as dirty do’.24
The next morning the party got their permission to proceed. The postillion – ‘mostly a young, always a lively man’, Faraday generalised of the profession of hired local coachmen – gave a laugh and showed off his jackboots as he walked stiffly from the fireside to the horses to prepare for the journey. Faraday’s interest in high technical detail brings him to describe fully the appearance, purpose, weight (fourteen to twenty pounds a pair) and construction of the jackboot, the iron and leather leg armour that protected the postillion, who rode the near-side lead horse, from breaking his legs in an accident. The party climbed aboard the carriage to their allotted places, the postillion checked the trappings, clambered up to his saddle, fixed his jackboots into position and tucked in his coat. With a glance back at the driver, he cracked his whip, ‘a most tremendous weapon to dogs, pigs and little children. With a handle of about 30 inches, it has a thong of 6 or 8 feet in length, and it is constantly in a state of violent vibratory motion over the heads of the horses, giving rise to a rapid succession of stunning sounds.’25
There was Faraday, ever-ready with his observing eye, out in the air on top of the coach, and off they went with a lurch towards Paris. They had hoped to cover the ground like the wind, the whip-thong crackling over the heads of the horses. But the roads were potholed and rutted, and they were shaken about desperately. They may not have considered just how big France is. The distance between Morlaix and Paris is about the same as that between Land’s End and Dover, a major expedition by the standards of the day. One dark evening outside Rennes a horse stumbled and broke its traces. While they were waiting in the cold for the postillion to calm the animals and refix the harness, Faraday saw a glow-worm shining on the road. He had never seen one before, and its light entranced him. He picked it up, poked at it, watched how its light came from two luminous spots which brightened and faded, brightened and faded and then failed altogether. ‘On examining it afterwards … I found it to be a small black worm not three fourths of an inch in length and having no parts particularly distinguished as those which had been luminous.’26
They lumbered late into Rennes and put up at the cold and desolate post house, which Faraday describes in the tones of a gothic novelist, reminiscent of Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho: ‘from being built of stone, from containing long galleries, winding stone stairs, narrow passages, deserted rooms &c [it] strongly reminded me of the interior of a romantic castle, and a black man as cook, attendant &c wonderfully assisted the fancy’.27
They carried on through Laval, Alençon and Dreux, picking up bread and wine in villages on the way, putting up at post houses and huddling in front of miserable fires. Faraday noticed that travellers were provided with firewood in the bedrooms, but the wood was always green, and needed bellows to keep it alight – and of course, there were never any bellows to be had. Late on the seventh day after leaving Morlaix, the party approached Paris. Thirty or forty miles out, the roads began to improve, practical signs of the effects of Napoleon’s public works strategy. The roads were straight, and for four or five miles would stretch ahead in a line, and then, with a slight bend would stretch on again. ‘The eye,’ Faraday writes, ‘is enabled to perceive at once all it will see for the next hour [and] the expectation slackens and a monotonous effect is produced.’28