Three ‘original’ sources refer to Davy’s accident and the events around it. The fullest is a long, affectionate letter written to an unknown recipient by George Riebau a year after Faraday had left his apprenticeship:
[Faraday] would occasionally call on me and expressing a wish to be introduced to Sir H. Davy, I advised him to write a letter and take his manuscript books and drawings, and leave them for Sr H.D. to examine, he did so, and next morning the Footman brought a note requesting to see him he attended. Sir H. enquired into his circumstances and told him to attend to the bookbinding and if any opportunity occurred he would think of him. Soon after this Sir H. met with an accident from the bursting some glass part of which flew into his eye, he sent for M. Faraday who transacted some business to his satisfaction …30
Riebau shows great pride at Faraday’s youthful achievements and at his courage and dogged application to the job of finding employment in science. This, however, is the only source that specifically states that he and Davy had met before the accident. This first meeting must have been in the few days in late October 1812 between Davy’s return from Scotland and his visit to Tunbridge Wells. It also suggests that Faraday had acted promptly on Riebau’s advice to send his manuscript lecture notes to Davy after Abbott had finished reading them by 20 September.31 In an autobiographical note that Faraday’s first biographer Henry Bence Jones reprinted, Faraday corroborated much of Riebau’s account, but gave special credit to Mr Dance:
Under the encouragement of Mr Dance I wrote to Sir Humphry Davy, sending as a proof of my earnestness, the notes I had taken of his last four lectures. The reply was immediate, kind, and favourable. After this I continued to work as a book binder, with the exception of some days during which I was writing as an amanuensis for Sir H. Davy, at the time when the latter was wounded in the eye from an explosion of the chloride of nitrogen.32
After Faraday’s brief introduction to Davy’s working practice, Davy wrote to him on 24 December 1812. Faraday treasured this letter, in which Davy had wrongly addressed him as ‘Mr P. Faraday’, and may not have shown it to anybody beyond his immediate family until he sent it to Davy’s first biographer John Ayrton Paris in December 1829.33 Davy wrote:
I am far from being displeased with the proof you have given me of your confidence & which displays great zeal, power of memory & attention.
I am obliged to go out of Town & shall not be settled in Town till the end of Jany. I will then see you any time you wish. It would gratify me to be of any service to you. I wish it may be in my power.34
Davy’s assessment of Faraday’s competence as an emergency secretary when he was partially blinded and in need of help was a sure foundation for the success of their later collaboration. Despite his resigning from lecturing, the Royal Institution Managers would not let Davy go, and gave him an Honorary Professorship and reinstated him as Director of the Laboratory and Mineral Collection, with no salary.35
When Faraday first made his way to the laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institution he knew he was entering hallowed ground. He saw the two parts of the room, rows of seats and the lecturer’s table on one side, and the top-lit and well-ventilated laboratory on the other. There was a prominent sand bath with a furnace attached to it, a forge, some double leather bellows, an anvil, and a blow-pipe on a table with more bellows. Further, there was a large trough of mercury which gleamed silvery in the light, some water troughs and long battery troughs with plates of copper and zinc emerging from them, and trailing wires. Then, standing about in a jumble on benches, shelves and open cupboards, there was all the romantic and evocative paraphernalia of the dedicated natural philosopher, a collection so redolent of the exploration of the unsteady edges of science that it was to Faraday as thrilling a place to enter as was the robbers’ cave to Ali Baba. It was an unruly collection of stuff: gasometers, filtering stands, glass jars and pipes, retorts, bottles and dishes in earthenware and glass, and in cupboards and the room next door delicate instruments for weighing and measuring, air pumps, balances and so on. As John Davy wrote later describing his brother’s laboratory, ‘there was no finery in it, or fitting up for display; nothing to attract vulgar admiration; no arrangement of apparatus in orderly disposition for lectures, and scarcely any apparatus solely intended for this purpose’.36
From 11 October to 7 December there is a pause in the letters Faraday sent to Abbott. He broke his silence on 7 December, apologising that he had six unanswered letters from Abbott in his portfolio. He pleaded ‘inability’, which covers a multitude of possibilities, but which may suggest that while he was being loaded with bookbinding work by his ‘disagreeable master’,37 he was also taking on as much secretarial work as he could for Sir Humphry. His new employer de la Roche evidently got wind of Faraday’s ambitions in science, and for that reason perhaps gave him ‘so much trouble that he felt he could not remain in his place’.38 Nevertheless de la Roche, who had no children himself, made Faraday an offer that he thought the young man could not easily refuse. Impressed by Faraday’s bookbinding skills, he promised ‘on certain conditions’ to transfer his business to him, and ‘thus to make him a Man of Property’.39 This Faraday did refuse, despite the risk of immediately running foul of de la Roche’s passions, but having been brought up by Sandemanian parents, he would have found it easy to resist becoming a man of property, and thus have the vote, two civic distinctions which Sandemanians treated with disdain.
Faraday now found himself in a very difficult and uncertain personal position. In one corner he had an unpredictable master whom he had unwisely frustrated; in another the teachings of a church which he respected; in a third he faced impending poverty in the all-too-real possibility of losing his bookbinding job; and in a fourth he had to consider the money he gave to his widowed mother, a landlady in straitened circumstances. Colouring all this in a gloomy sweep of pallid grey was his lack of ready patronage, and no sign of permanent work in science, the one sphere which truly attracted him. The only chink of light was his brief employment with Davy, and the mild interest that Sir Humphry was showing in him. But even Davy, who had after all been Faraday’s second choice of employer after Sir Joseph Banks, had advised Faraday to stick to the bookbinding in the long run.40 No correspondence from or to Faraday survives from the first two months of 1813, but on 19 February there was a punch-up at the Royal Institution, and out of this petty but violent incident Michael Faraday got the job in science that he coveted, and the future began.
During the year following Davy’s resignation the day-to-day management of the Royal Institution was in the hands of the new Professor of Chemistry, William Thomas Brande. He was an uncharismatic, plodding man, who was described in later years as giving lectures that were ‘eminently sound and useful’, and, in a remarkable sequence of negatives that give a half-hearted cheer to him as Sir Humphry Davy’s successor, ‘he was never brilliant or eloquent, but his experiments never failed’.41 Brande expected his lectures to be set up carefully for him, with all the necessary instruments, chemicals and illustrations in place. The laboratory assistant William Payne seems to have failed to do the job properly on 19 February, and the Institution’s instrument-maker John Newman told him so. Payne punched Newman; they shouted and brawled; the superintendent William Harris heard the ‘great noise’, and came to investigate. Newman complained to Harris that Payne had hit him, Harris rose to his full height and charged Payne with the offence, and Payne went off muttering imprecations. The Royal Institution Managers were told of this at their meeting three days later, and Payne was sacked.42
As