Faraday: The Life

Faraday’s indifference to Pope Pius VII’s return to Rome may reflect Sandemanian attitudes, but nonetheless Sandemanians were encouraged to keep abreast of current affairs. What did catch Faraday’s attention in these few weeks in Montpellier, however, was the French manner of weighing goods in the market, and of sawing large logs of wood, a technique he recorded in a sketch. Neither method had he seen in England. He trawled around the booksellers, he watched peddlers performing in the market, and he went to the theatre. Although he did not understand the dialogue, he ‘unexpectedly found out the meaning by that universal language of gesture, for it was most exuberantly employed’.19

While Faraday ignored the climactic events, their significance was clear to Sir Humphry. He wove the grand sight of a British fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, which Faraday too must have seen, into his poem ‘The Canigou’, in praise of the peak in the French Pyrenees.

… On the wave

Triumphant ride the fleets of Ocean’s Queen.

My heart throbs quicker, and a healthful glow

Fills all my bosom. Albion, thee I hail! –

Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!

Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds

Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone

Of war destructive, but a living light

Of honour, glory, and security, –

A light of science, liberty, and peace!20

Though he had been admitted to France as a guest of Napoleon, perhaps also as a political pawn, a sign to all warring parties that science was above politics and warfare, Davy had no doubt at all where his loyalties lay. Science, to him, was a real part of the war effort, part of Britain’s fire, the living light sent out to wither the tyrant, as he expressed it. His role, as exemplified by his analysis of iodine, was to be the leading edge of the fire, and being jealous of French achievements, he aimed to humiliate French science before he returned to England.

Leaving Montpellier before sunrise on Monday, 7 January, they arrived in Nîmes at noon. They spent the rest of the day, and the next, picking about the Roman remains, the Pont du Gard, the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carré and the Grand Fountain. Faraday goes into much detail about these – some of the information reads as if it has been lifted out of a guidebook – but he seems to be more greatly taken by the geological activity around the Grand Fountain than by the antiquities themselves: ‘Rocks of enormous magnitude and height are so thrown together by nature as to form a broken kind of crescent.’21 He is prosaic about the remains, descriptive, matter-of-fact:

This place was by the various and overwhelming accidents of time nearly buried and forgotten. The canal was filled up with earth and the springs stopped or diverted. It was not more than a century ago that the encumbring rubbish was cleared away and the broken or destroyed parts rebuilt, but this has been done in a manner approaching to the ancient style and thus an adequate idea may be formed of what it originally was.

From Nîmes they went to Avignon, across the Rhône on the rope-ferry, their carriage perched precariously across the beam. Then to Vaucluse to see the famous fountain and the home of Petrarch. The place inevitably drew out the poet in Davy, and warmed his fellow-feeling with Petrarch:

A scene of pastoral beauty glads my eye,

Well suited to a pastoral poet’s song.

…

I wonder not the poet loved thy wave, –

Thy cavern’d rocks, – thy giant precipice;

For such a scene was suited well to break

The tyrant-spell of love … 22

Davy, the romantic scientist, is hopelessly revisionist when it comes to writing poetry. Although he performed his science with the aplomb of a man of the Romantic era, his poetry drives him back to the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of Thomson, Pope and Akenside. From Faraday’s perspective, however, we have a more detached reading of Petrarch’s vale:

At some little distance from the head, and after having passed two or three beautiful cascades, the stream divides into branches forming three rivers of considerable size. The water is extremely clear and pure, and of a beautiful green colour. The bed of the river is carpetted with a thousand water plants, and an eternal verdure seems to reign in the environs of Petrarch’s haunts.23

Faraday is wholly susceptible to natural beauty, and writes in a style that can evoke the high colour, sparkle, light and jewels in a landscape. It is a language that Goethe, Humboldt and Coleridge knew best.

There are signs in the Journal that Sir Humphry explained things regularly to Faraday as they went along, discussed the geology of the country, talked about scientific phenomena as the occasion demanded. Much of the geological information that Faraday records must have come from Davy there and then; because there are only a few recorded instances of direct instruction we should not suppose that that was all there was. In the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes Sir Humphry expatiated on the nature of the wind coming down the valley at Vaucluse, on the melt-water running off Mont Ventoux, and together he and Faraday seem to have discussed the dramatic crepuscular rays that they saw on the road to Aix-en-Provence.

They were now travelling along some of the most beautiful coastal roads in Europe, and after forty-seven days on the road from Paris, the ecstatic responses that burst out of Faraday in the Forest of Fontainebleau had been temporarily blunted: ‘Left Aix this morning. Nothing particular the whole day, for pretty scenery has now become common, though not less interesting.’24

It was not the grand sweep of landscape that captivated him now, but detail and opportunities to exercise, so he ran around after the small green lizards, ‘too nimble to be caught’, that he found basking in the sun on banks of lettuces. He was amused at being told by an innkeeper that the Pope had spent the night at his inn six days earlier; to induce them to stay they were given the Pope’s bed to sleep in. Faraday was surely the only Sandemanian ever to have been offered the Pope’s bed, an event for which his religious training gave no particular guidance.

They travelled on through Fréjus, ‘the delightful town of Nice’, and on towards the Italian border. Faraday’s sense of wonder returned to him in a flood.

I never saw such fine scenery as on this part of our road. It was magnificence and immensity itself. The rocks often rose perpendicularly on the side of the road for many hundred feet, and sometimes overhung it in the most terrific manner. In one place the way had by blasting and hewing been actually cut out of the side of a leaning rock, and with the roaring river at the bottom and the opposite precipices was an inconceivably romantic situation. The whole here limestone.25

They had now turned north up the valley of the Roya. The freezing weather had caused enormous icicles to form where water poured out of the rocks, and many of these had broken off and scattered onto the road, ‘threaten[ing] destruction to the passing traveller’. They had to move them aside to make a way through, but, Faraday wrote, ‘the fragments were often too heavy for me to lift’.26 On Saturday, 19 February, they rose at dawn and girded themselves to make the final climb over the Col de Tende into Italy. Faraday put on an extra waistcoat and two pairs of stockings under the thick leather overalls and shoes which were his travelling garments. Instead of putting it away when he dressed that morning, he kept his nightcap on. He was ready to go.

There was a deep snowfield all around them as they set off. The men they had hired to help them over the mountain were beginning to gather. There would be about sixty-five of them altogether, mountain men from the villages whose job it was to dismantle the carriage and rope it to sledges, and manhandle the lot up to the peak and back down the other side. They whistled and talked, totally familiar with and unimpressed by the dramatic mountainscape, and scaring the travellers with their warnings about avalanches and precipices. Sir Humphry and Faraday kept their nerve by taking readings on their barometer to gauge their height, and discussing the geology. Davy pointed out the micaceous schist, and told Faraday that where there was micaceous schist there was also granite. There were two sedan chairs, one each for Lady Davy and her maid, who both went on ahead. Travellers coming the other way passed them, and the men with the sledges set off at a run, shouting and cheering as they went. The party was soon scattered into groups, Davy and Faraday taking up the rear. They followed the mule tracks, and Faraday stopped to sketch how the mules’ footsteps enlarged and softened as the sun on the snow warmed them. Far ahead in the distance they could see the sedan chairs crawling along a ridge, ‘and a bird soaring below it – the men pointed out to me as an eagle’.27

By late afternoon they had reached the summit, six thousand feet above sea level.

The view from this elevation was very peculiar, and if immensity bestows grandeur was very grand. The sea in the distance stretching out apparently to infinity. The enormous snow-clad mountains, the clouds below the level of the eye and the immense white valley before us were objects which struck the eye more by their singularity than their beauty, and would after two or three repetitions raise feelings of regret rather than of pleasure.28

The sledge with the carriage paused at the top, while the foot-passengers and some of the mules went ahead. They had been warned about hollows in the snow, practically invisible on the surface, but nevertheless Faraday slipped many times and found himself up to his chest in snow. One animal and its load were nearly lost – it missed its footing and tumbled over, rolling several yards down the mountain, and had to be dug out and righted by all hands. Looking back, they saw the carriage on its sledge setting off, gathering speed rapidly, with the men running alongside skidding down the mountain, practically out of control. As night fell, they heard the dong, dong of a village bell, and carried on through the snow until they crossed into Italy and reached Limone Piemonte, where they spent the night.

Continuing northwards for two days, they reached Turin during Carnivale. The following day was Shrove Tuesday, and Faraday ‘strolled’ – his word – into the whirling streets in search of a party. Faraday’s stroll in a new town had become a ritual for him, and in Turin he went to the edge of the city and among some trees by the River Po he listened to the bands and watched the dancers spin around the musicians in rings. Between the bands and the circles of ‘ever-moving and never-tired dancers’ were ‘singers, leapers, boxers, chestnut merchants, apple stalls, beggars’, everyday Italian life, enchanted by the excitement and celebration. Faraday then strolled back into town, where he saw the Corso, the even more extraordinary custom of the well-to-do of Turin who despatched their ‘carriages, curricles, saddle horses &c’ to be driven empty for several hours up and down for show, as the crowd looked on.

There were … an immense number of persons who stood on each side of the street looking and gazing with great apparent satisfaction, and who if they had been conscious of the comparison I was then making between the scene before me and the one I had just left would have looked down on me with contempt and derision, no doubt equal at least to that which at the same time occupied my mind.29

The continental journey was, for Faraday, beginning by now to develop a pattern of its own. Long, weary travelling from town to town was enlivened by ad hoc instruction from Davy, and landscapes and antiquities that he had read or been told about and perhaps never dreamt he would one day see. His Journal record is detailed and engaging, and although scientific subjects are regular themes, they do not dominate. He writes as if he is taking notes (which he probably was), quite as much as making an account for his own future reflection, enjoyment and remembrance.

Davy and Faraday were among the very last of the Grand Tourists, those wealthy Englishmen and their companions who in the decades leading up to the war with France had travelled in their thousands through France and Germany to Italy in search of antiquities and classical learning. Davy’s mission was science, while for Faraday there was an ambivalence about the true aims of the journey. He had scientific duties to perform for Sir Humphry, certainly, but for himself the dividend would not be science but a widening knowledge that it brought him of the depth, richness and pattern of European culture. This came to underpin Faraday’s outlook all his life, and as the decades passed we can see how crucial these eighteen months in Europe were for him, and how they influenced the pattern and direction of his career and achievement.

The character that the Journal most directly evokes is of a receptive young man, talkative, animated, urgent, eager to know, determined to understand, one who happily disregards the discomforts in exchange for the riches that travel will reveal. He is curious about religious practices on the continent, but there is little clear evidence of his own religious beliefs. On his travels this reluctant Sandemanian comes across as a bon viveur who enjoys good food and wine, attending the theatre, dressing up and taking part with enthusiasm in masked balls. He has read his guide books, and is precise in recording details of distance and dimension, as if he too were writing a guide. As a tourist, slogging round the towns he visits on foot, he is energetic and assiduous, keen to find the high point for the panoramic view, eager to visit museums, galleries and gardens, and to watch local celebrations and processions. He does not waste his time. Whether in the marketplace, the inn or the museum, Faraday is curious, and works very hard to feel and to express the textures of the continent, and the customs of the people around him.

All these qualities, which the continental Journal articulated, emerge in their time in Faraday’s later life. The Journal is the seedbed where we can see the shoots of his coming character beginning to poke through. The fact that he wrote it up a second time, the latter part perhaps nearly ten years later, also tells us something worth noting: without making too much of it, Faraday is preserving the young, ebullient Mike for posterity before he is sucked down into adulthood, marriage, responsibility, social conformity, religious non-conformity, decisions, and the perpetual need to earn a living.

In many of the towns he visited, Faraday sought out the bookshops, printers and bookbinders, looking back through them at his earlier, now abandoned, life. He wrote to Riebau: ‘My old profession of books has oftentimes occurred to my mind and been productive of much pleasure.’30 He bought books at ‘every large town we came to’, but soon found he had accumulated too many, and had to deny himself, though he may have lost some of those he had bought somewhere en route.31 He tried to buy a French grammar in France, an Italian—English dictionary in Italy, and later in the journey an English—German dictionary, but try as he might, languages always had a tendency to elude him. He went to the theatre on two or three occasions, but never really understood the dialogue, unable to keep up with its relentless speed.

A recurrent and characteristic theme in the Journal is Faraday’s fascination for detail. There was the phosphorescence in the harbour mud at Morlaix; the analysis of a postillion’s equipment; the glow-worm on the road to Rennes; the telegraph at Montmartre; notices of the various methods of weighing goods in the marketplace, with comparisons between the English, French and Italian practices. Together, these and many other observations add up to an extended series of insights into continental life of a depth which would have graced any great travel writer of the nineteenth century – Richard Ford or Sir Richard Burton come to mind – and could have provided material for a painter on his travels. If Michael Faraday had achieved nothing else in his lifetime, this Journal would by now have had due recognition, and we would know him well as an incisive travel writer who sparkled once and vanished like a shooting star.

There is another beam along which we can take a fresh perspective on Faraday’s youthful life and character. This shines out from his letters home, to his mother, sisters, and principally to Benjamin Abbott. Each letter is heavily and opaquely overwritten, but they have an immediacy which time and revision might have blunted in the Journal. The first surviving letter, to Faraday’s mother, is dated 9 December 1813, six weeks after the party had arrived in Paris.32 The war frustrated the free flow of correspondence between France and England, and this letter was carried home by ‘a person who is now here, but who expects soon to part for England’. It is a short letter, a mere wave, with no news, just the apologetic ‘I could say much more, but nothing of importance.’

Margaret Faraday gets a longer letter four months later, from Rome, and it is from this that we can begin to take a new view of the journey. From the start there is a studied deference to Sir Humphry, which reflects the style of the pair’s day-to-day relationship: ‘by a high favour Sir H. Davy will put [this letter] with his own, and it will be conveyed by a particular person’. There are tiny hints of unhappiness such as a loving son might try to suggest to his mother, but not so much as to worry her. The journey had been ‘as pleasant and agreeable (a few things excepted, in reality nothing) as it was possible to be’. Faraday runs quickly over events in Paris, how Sir Humphry’s ‘high name’ in the city gave them easy access to everything they wanted to see, and how their passports were granted ‘with the utmost readiness’. He sweeps his mother down through France in a line or two, gives her a hint of the dangers of travel in a remark about their stormy passage between Genoa and Lerici, writes nothing about Florence, and tips her out at Rome, ‘in the midst of things curious and interesting’. But with this and the letter written a fortnight later to Benjamin Abbott, we begin to get additional information that adds depth to the Journal account.

They had been held up by bad weather in Genoa, while trying to take a boat across the bay to Lerici. Taking advantage of the delay Sir Humphry called on Professor Viviani, who had some electric fish in captivity, and tried to discover if the fishes’ electric charge was strong enough to decompose water; he found it was not, but nevertheless they gave some good shocks.33 The short voyage to Lerici was rough and dangerous, but it had the effect of silencing Lady Davy, who seems not to have stopped talking since they left England. Faraday was beginning to get fed up with her and her imperious ways, treating him like the servant he did not consider himself to be. In a later recollection Abbott wrote an account of what Faraday must have told him when he came home:

When in a boat in the Gulf of Genoa a sudden storm of wind … placed them for some time in some danger, and she (Lady D) was so alarmed that she became almost faint and in consequence ceased from talking. This, he told me, was so great a relief to him that he quite enjoyed the quiet and did not at all regret the cause that produced it, though the situation was for some time critical.34

Passing through Italy, they drove into Lucca a day ahead of the English army that had landed at Livorno, and received a surprising and rapturous welcome. The entire town, waiting outside the gates, cheered and ululated as they trotted past. The crowd did not care that the carriage carried no guns to drive the French out; all that mattered was that the passengers were English, and grandees too apparently, smiling and waving as they passed along the line of people. To Abbott Faraday wrote:

… since we have left the French dominions we have been received with testimonies of pleasure & gratitude as strong as it was possible for the tongue to express. At Lucca we found the whole population without the gates waiting for the English … The town was decorated in the most brilliant manner by colours, drapery and embroidery flying from every window, & in the evening general illuminations took place done as expressive of their joy at the deliverance from the French government, & the English were hailed everywhere as their Saviours.35

They arrived in Florence flushed and delighted. It was a glorious morning, enhanced by the good fortune of finding the best hotel, ‘a Palace both outside and inside’, as Faraday described it,36 and that is probably just what it was. For the next two days he took himself off on his strolls about town. He discovered the River Arno, admired the bridges, particularly Ponte Santa Trinità, with its ‘air so light and free one can scarcely imagine it to be of stone’.37 He walked to the Duomo, the Baptistery, considered climbing Giotto’s campanile for ‘the finest possible view of Florence & the environs’, and then on to the Piazza Signoria. The bronzes in these public areas caught his eye particularly – the Baptistery doors, ‘bronze and most beautifully cast’; in the square ‘the bronze is a fine figure of Perseus with the head of Medusa’.

The great object of the visit to Florence was to go with Sir Humphry to see the scientific instruments formerly in use at Accademia del Cimento, once the working place of Galileo, and by now in the Museo di Storia Naturale. Faraday told Abbott all about it: ‘here is a fine Museum of Natural History containing an immense quantity of things curious & instructive and some wax works in anatomy & botany of the most delicate kind. The collection of apparatus is numerous and rendered invaluable by the instruments of Galileo & the Duke of Tuscany.’38

He goes on to describe the telescope with which Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in 1610, the ‘vast quantity’ of electrical machines and apparatus, the magnets – one of which could support a weight of 150 pounds39 – and particularly the great lens that Grand Duke Ferdinand III had commissioned. There were minerals, shells, insects, and stuffed birds and their eggs. The last room ‘contains some singular specimens of carving and modelling representing the horrors of death in the Plague and in a sepulchre. There were some Egyptian mummies in the room, one of them opened.’40

For two days Sir Humphry and Faraday worked on iodine in the museum’s laboratory, and also began to prepare for a dramatic experiment to show that diamond is pure carbon, a chemically identical substance. They set the Duke’s lenses, the larger one fourteen or fifteen inches in diameter, out in the garden. It was a sunny morning, and they tested their strength and efficacy by putting a piece of wood at the focus. Instantly the wood burst into flame. These were also the days of the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrated in Florence with great excitement. Faraday recorded the atmosphere in his Journal: ‘The country people flocked into the town in their best attire, the women ornamented with enormously large ear-rings and an abundance of gold and silver lace about the head.’41 People were shouting, cannon firing, and fairground booths had been set up in the streets between the cathedral and the Annunziata. Faraday went into the cathedral ‘at about 11 o’clock’ and heard the Te Deum to the sound of trumpets and cannonfire: ‘The sound of the trumpet in so large an inclosed space produced a striking effect on the mind – the music beautiful.’

On Sunday morning, the Feast of the Annunciation, Sir Humphry set a diamond on a perforated dish mounted on a platinum rod inside a thick glass globe. This was filled with a stream of hydrogen, ignited to heat the diamond. They had moved the equipment out of the garden, and now they were upstairs in the museum, by a south-facing window. On a wooden framework to one side was an air pump whose iron arm and oiled joints glistened in the sunshine as Faraday gently wound them up and down. Adjacent was a bubbling retort with potassium chlorate being heated to produce oxygen. Pipes joined the pump to the globe and the globe to the retort. As the hydrogen was drawn out of the globe by the pump, the oxygen, with a huff and a sneeze, was drawn in. Thus, the diamond was bathed in an atmosphere of oxygen, as pure as Davy and Faraday could make it.42