After singing a hymn [this was voices only; there were no musical instruments], a member of the church prays; these exercises are repeated three or four times; one of the Elders then reads some chapters from the Old or New Testaments; this is followed by singing; another Elder then prays, and either expounds or preaches for about three-quarters of an hour. Singing follows; and the service is concluded by a short prayer and benediction … In the afternoon, the former part of the service is curtailed; but after the sermon the church is stayed to receive the Lord’s Supper, and contribute to the poor. When this is over, the members of the church are called upon to exercise their gifts by exhortation.12
The Faradays cannot have stayed for long at the Elephant and Castle. During their first few years in London they lived in Gilbert Street, south of Oxford Street, and in 1796 moved across Oxford Street to the back premises of 16 Jacob’s Mews.13 The Mews was remarkable for one thing in particular – it ran behind the Spanish Chapel of the Spanish Embassy, the one place in London in which Roman Catholics could worship legally before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1828. For Sandemanians this was an extreme juxtaposition of religious practice; no more extreme could they know. In London, as in Westmorland, the Faradays balanced on the edge of poverty. However hard he worked – and his ill-health was a further handicap – James Faraday found it near impossible to support his family, certainly impossible to get anywhere better to live than rented rooms above his smithy.
In 1804, when Michael was thirteen or fourteen, he had to put his schooling behind him and begin to earn some money for the family. He found a job as an errand boy for George Riebau, a Huguenot émigré bookbinder and bookseller in Blandford Street, sixty seconds by an errand boy’s swift run from the Faraday smithy.14 As a Huguenot, Riebau was also a member of a Protestant community which, like the Sandemanians, gathered together to protect itself against external aggression. But Riebau was also an activist in radical politics. He published radical religious and political tracts, including translations of the religious writings of Emanuel Swedenborg by Robert Hindmarsh, a founder of the Swedenborgian church in London. He also wrote a memoir, now lost, of Richard Brothers (1757–1824), who claimed to be the Prince of the Hebrews and ruler of the world.15 Brothers went so far as to demand that King George III give up his crown to him, and this led to his imprisonment as a criminal lunatic. Riebau, who became known on the street as ‘Bookseller to the Prince of the Hebrews’, and may have been a Swedenborgian himself, was also a member of the subversive London Corresponding Society in the 1790s.16 So the milieu that Michael Faraday was dropped into was a hotbed of religious dissent and radicalism, an exciting but dangerous place to be, and a place where curious, difficult, intellectual, cranky and dangerous people would gather, discuss and gossip, and where there were always interesting books and pamphlets lying about.
Two contrasting influences on Faraday’s early life seem to have met with some force in Riebau’s shop: his family Sandemanianism encountered the Swedenborgian beliefs that found sympathy with Riebau. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a world-shaping genius who has been compared to Aristotle. In his earlier career in Sweden he was an eminent and highly influential scientist and inventor who wrote on chemistry, metallurgy, astronomy, natural history, geology and topics ranging wide across the landscape of natural philosophy. Then in middle life his inspiration changed direction, leading him to write profound religious works which created the philosophical foundation of a new church anticipating the second coming of Christ and the building of a New Jerusalem.17 His writings found fertile soil in England and subsequently America, but the point to be made here is that Swedenborg, who spent some of his latter years in London writing his religious philosophy, had demonstrated how one life could naturally integrate practical science with coherent religion. This would present a potent role model for any young man in the early nineteenth century whose passion for science had to negotiate a firm wall of religious dogma, and Swedenborgian thought may even have revealed to Faraday a doorway through it.
From the start, Michael was known at Riebau’s as ‘Faraday’, a formal courtesy that indicated his low status in the workshop.18 One of his first duties was to take newspapers round to Riebau’s clients early in the morning, and then, later in the day, to collect them again and take them on to somebody else. Thus did news circulate in London in the early nineteenth century. But Faraday was clearly too bright for this sort of work to satisfy him for long, and after a year or so Riebau offered him an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. His indentures were signed on 7 October 1805.19 Now he had seven years of hard work, training and extraordinary influences to look forward to, but security and companionship also, and prospects for the future. Thus his life slipped up a gear, and began to look encouraging, at exactly the same time as the outlook for the nation began to brighten when news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar on 21 October began to circulate in London by the hands of errand newsboys.
Faraday became a skilful bookbinder under Riebau’s tutelage. He learned how to trim the piles of pages sent by the printer, fold them into signatures with a folding stick and beat the folds to make them smooth and open cleanly. Then he learned how to sew the gathered signatures on to their bands – six or seven to a folio book, five to a quarto – and how to flick vermilion and sap-green pigment from a brush in a regular random pattern on the page edges. The covers came next – Riebau taught him how to cut the hides that lay in piles in the yard, and to choose the parts of the leather that were best suited for covering book boards. Faraday learned, too, how to boil wheat flour to make the glue to stick the leather to the board, and how to shave and drill the boards to fit the page bundles. The smells and sounds of the workshop entranced him, so did the tools and paraphernalia, and the heavy wooden benches, worn, bumped and rilled by years of banging and rubbing by bookbinders. The final duty to every well-bound book was to glaze its cover with two coats of beaten white of egg, polish it with a polishing iron passed hot over the glazed cover, and stamp the letters of the title in gold leaf on the spine.20
From the beginning of the apprenticeship Riebau spotted something extraordinary in Faraday – his eagerness, his fascination with the books that came for binding, his keenness to study them rather than to treat them merely as bundles of paper to be sewn. Perhaps because of this Riebau gave Faraday just that bit more encouragement than he might give to other apprentices, and gave him too some practical opportunities to follow the directions that his intellect took him. Riebau would have noticed Faraday’s exceptional physical dexterity, the nimbleness of his fingers, how he could ‘strike 1000 blows in succession [with a hammer] without resting’, and his respect for these qualities grew early in their years together.21 By the end of the apprenticeship Riebau was convinced that he had been the master of a genius, and told others so in an ‘account of the Progress of Genius in an Apprentice’, which he wrote for publication.22
Faraday read what he was binding, and having the third volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica come into his hands, was fired with enthusiasm by the ‘Electricity” article. This was no secret from Riebau, who encouraged him to make electrical instruments, and gave him the time and the space in the back of the shop to do so. Faraday read Lavoisier’s seminal treatise Elements of Chemistry, first published in English in 1790, and Conversations in Chemistry by Jane Marcet also came in for binding. With jars and cooking pots Faraday followed the experiments described by that popular author, who wrote particularly for the young. Marcet was widely admired in literary and scientific society. The writer Maria Edgeworth described her as someone ‘who had so much accurate information and who can give it out in narrative so clearly, so much for the pleasure and benefit of others without the least ostentation or mock humility’.23 Many years later Faraday recalled the impact