CHAPTER 1 ‘The Progress of Genius’
It is clear from the phrasing of his early letters that Michael Faraday spoke at breakneck speed when he wanted to explain something, or to relate his news, fact and reason flooding out of him with excitement and joy in the telling. He lived in London, above a blacksmith’s shop, a friendly boy, with an open face and thick brown curls on a head that was a size too big for his body.1 He was always short, and this made his head seem yet larger; he never grew above about five feet four inches, the height of Napoleon and J.M.W. Turner. His voice had an edge to it, an accent from the streets, and it was perhaps this that betrayed his vulnerability, his apartness, for beyond the accent he was as a boy unable to grip in his mouth words which had a sounding ‘r’ in them: he had what we now call a soft ‘r’. As a result, he could not pronounce his own name. ‘Michael Fawada’, he would say;2 or to avoid misunderstanding or teasing, ‘Mike’.
He had had no formal schooling, just a grounding of reading, writing and arithmetic at a day-school near the smithy in the back premises of 16 Jacob’s Mews, an alley north of Oxford Street. Faraday’s education was blunt – on one occasion when he spoke of his elder brother ‘Wobert’, the schoolmistress gave Robert a halfpenny to buy a cane to thrash the speech defect out of Michael.3 Robert refused to do any such thing, threw the coin over a wall and went home to tell his mother who promptly removed both boys from the school. When not at school, which was most of the time, Michael played with his friends in the street, or at home with his parents, elder brother and sisters. Jacob’s Mews was, and remains – for while the buildings have changed the building line has not – a wide, deep and bright alley, with plenty of room for blacksmithery and anvils to be set out in the yard, and for waiting horses to assemble. There was no academic learning in the family, and no likelihood of it. Michael’s father, James Faraday, had been sick for years, so the family’s financial and social future was insecure. Michael’s mother, Margaret, had however an instinctive feeling that her younger son, her third child, had a special quality, some rare intelligence and intuition in him that she had no word for. ‘My Michael!’, she would say.4
Both his parents were devout. They had been brought up in the strict, non-conformist Sandemanian church in Westmorland, in the north-west of England. They had met and married in it, and arranged their lives according to its lights and guidance. James Faraday was a plain, practical man, the third son in a large smallholding family of Christians from Clapham in north Yorkshire. The allegiance of his parents, Robert and Elizabeth Faraday, had shifted in the volatile atmosphere of religious dissent of the mid-eighteenth century from one sect, the Inghamites, to the Sandemanians. With a historical perspective these changes are minor twists in the grain, but in their period and parish they could lead to anger, betrayal, family division and exclusion. Robert Faraday preached to Inghamite and Sandemanian congregations in Clapham and surrounding villages, and brought his children up to fear God and support the community. His eldest son, Richard, became an innkeeper and grocer, the second, John, a weaver and later a farmer, and the third, James, a blacksmith. Other sons became tailors and leather workers, while the three daughters remained unmarried.5
Michael Faraday’s mother was the sixth child of Michael Hastwell, a farmer, and his wife Betty, of Black Scar Farm at Kaber, Westmorland. Having grown up on a farm, Margaret Hastwell brought rural talents such as threshing, winnowing and cheese- and butter-making to the marriage.6 Like the Faradays, the Hastwells had become Sandemanians, and attended the meeting house in Kirkby Stephen, the small market town on the northern side of the county boundary between Yorkshire and Westmorland. The Clapham and Kirkby Stephen congregations worshipped together from time to time, and it must have been in such sober circumstances that James Faraday and Margaret Hastwell met.7 He took a smithy opposite the King’s Head at Outhgill, five miles south of Kirkby Stephen; she became a maidservant at Deep Gill Farm nearby. They married, aged twenty-five and twenty-two respectively, at Kirkby Stephen parish church in 1786, and their first two children, Elizabeth and Robert, were born in 1787 and 1788.
Outhgill is in Mallerstang, the long, wide, green valley of the River Eden. Coaches travelling to Appleby, Penrith and Carlisle passed along the valley, a northern spur of the only practical route through the hills between Sedbergh to the west and Richmond forty miles over the Pennines to the east. In the year of Robert’s birth, life began to change for James and Margaret. There was a long drought in 1788. It had been a beautiful warm spring, but by the summer they were looking and then praying for rain. Their green Eden grew brown, sheep and cattle died, and the coaches came less often because there was not enough hay for the horses. Then came the autumn frosts, and the worst winter anywhere in England for years.8 For two weeks in December the valley was icy and empty of traffic, and there was no work for the smithy.
The next summer came news of the revolution in France, the mob storming the Bastille, and Louis XVI fleeing Versailles. Then little bands of ill-dressed soldiery marched up and down the valley en route for Carlisle, or Leeds, or London. The prospect of war was frightening, but the presence of poverty was far worse. So, approaching a monumental decision that would change their and their children’s lives, James and Margaret Faraday considered moving to a city. They talked and prayed with the Elders of the church in Kirkby Stephen, made their choice, and prepared to move to London. Margaret was pregnant when they left Outhgill. The slow passage from the north to London was Michael’s first journey. Conceived in Westmorland, he was born in rented rooms near the Elephant and Castle inn, south of the River Thames, on 22 September 1791.
James and Margaret Faraday brought their children up in the exclusive Sandemanian faith in Christ, keeping themselves to themselves, and walking every Sunday to the neat but severe Sandemanian chapel in Paul’s Alley, a dark passage running north from St Paul’s Cathedral, and permanently in shadow. The congregation had an unequal struggle to keep their chapel neat and clean, for Paul’s Alley, as recalled fifty years later, was ‘a narrow, dirty court, surrounded by squalid houses of the poorest of the poor’.9 When questions of temptation, sin, goodness or example arose in the family, they turned to the Bible for an answer. The family Bible (now in the Cuming Museum, Southwark) was their greatest treasure, and in it they recorded their family’s births and deaths. When they opened their Bible, they always found enlightenment and never questioned. Sandemanians followed the lead of the Scottish linen-maker turned divine, Robert Sandeman (1718–71), and dissented from the established churches of England, Wales and Scotland. These they believed were governed against the teachings of the New Testament, were corrupt, and administered as part of the worldly state rather than the kingdom of God.
Sandemanians preached love and hope rather than hellfire and damnation, but it was a tough love. Though they all came together in the aisles to pass the kiss of peace to each other at their services, and washed each other’s feet as a sign of humility, they demanded unanimity in church decisions, which was secured by ‘excluding’ minority dissenters; that is, throwing them out. This was a severe interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1.10, ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ The teachings of the Bible were literally and strictly true in Sandemanian belief, which preached an intellectual rather than an emotional response to scripture. In the passage from 1 Corinthians, ‘perfectly joined’ was the rub. Any variant interpretation of scripture was forbidden, to the extent that Sandemanians refused to hold communion with any who did not perfectly agree with them.
The Sandemanian faithful dined together in a Love Feast in the chapel’s spotless dining room, or at each other’s houses on Sundays, between morning and afternoon worship, and would not eat the meat of any creature that had been killed by having its neck wrung, as the blood of the creature had to flow at death: this followed instruction in Acts 15.20. Games of chance were also banned, because to Sandemanians the lot was sacred to God, and property, they believed, was common to all. As a small sect, despised or at best dismissed by the established church, they stuck together, intermarried and assisted each other in