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