Books were sold without covers in the early nineteenth century, and there was such a flow of material for binding through Riebau’s workshop that Faraday could not have been better placed. He read Ali Baba, saw Hogarth’s engravings,25 studied landscape engravings, portrait prints and satirical engravings by Gillray and Rowlandson. The Repository of Arts journal passed through his hands, as did the Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. These are some of the few titles that we know he handled: to skip forward a hundred years, it must have been like sitting in the British Museum Reading Room with the whole world of literature passing book by book, day by day, past your eyes. Riebau encouraged him to copy from the books, text and illustrations, and he would settle down to do this at the end of the day when his fellow apprentices went off to mess around: ‘I was a very lively, imaginative person,’ he would later write, ‘and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia. But facts were important and saved me. I could trust a fact, but always cross-examined an assertion.’26
Riebau also encouraged Faraday to travel about London to see machinery in action, such as at the new pumping stations at Holloway and Hammersmith, where steam engines had been installed, and to see extraordinary feats of construction such as the Highgate Archway. He urged him to look at works of art on exhibition at the Royal Academy at Somerset House or the British Institution in Pall Mall, and asked customers if they would do him the favour of allowing the young man to see works of art in their private collections.
Among Riebau’s customers were some of the leading artists of London. One was the miniature painter Richard Cosway, a Swedenborgian who dabbled in alchemy, mysticism and mesmerism;27 another was the architect and artist George Dance the Younger; both were art collectors and may reasonably have been among those whose collections Riebau wanted Faraday to see. The Dance family, sons and grandsons of the architect and Surveyor to the Corporation of London George Dance the Elder, had an extended family tradition and made their own influential careers variously in the creative and performing arts. George Dance the Younger was the fifth and last of the sons, his father’s pupil who became a highly influential architect and Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. Among the younger George Dance’s buildings were Newgate Prison, Lord Lansdowne’s Library in Berkeley Square and the Ionic portico of the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Having spent some years in Rome as a young man, Dance the Younger was well versed in the form and function of classical architecture, and interpreted it in his own buildings. George and the other Dances, all men of some power and influence, were variously Proprietors or Life Subscribers to the new Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.
Towards the end of 1809 the Faraday family moved from Jacob’s Mews to Weymouth Street, a two-minute run from Riebau’s shop. James Faraday’s ill-health, and the death of his landlady, which may have brought with it further complications in the tenancy, forced him to give up the blacksmithery, and he and his family appear to have exchanged the smithy for 18 Weymouth Street with another tenant.28 James died in 1810, and George Riebau took his place as the father figure to lead Michael Faraday and to broaden his outlook. One lifelong friend, the painter and inventor of optical drawing instruments Cornelius Varley, who was also briefly a member of the Sandemanian church, remembered the young Michael Faraday well: ‘he was the best bookworm for eating his way to the inside; for hundreds had worked at books only as so much printed paper. Faraday saw a mine of knowledge, and resolved to explore it.’29
As an example of the right boy being at the right place at the right time, Michael Faraday is comparable in one aspect of his upbringing with the young J.M.W. Turner. Fifteen years earlier, Turner had been a youthful presence in his father’s Covent Garden barber’s shop. The flow that energised him was not one of books, but of customers who passed through the shop and were shown watercolours by the barber’s son. ‘My son is going to be a painter,’ Turner the barber said. Equally, George Riebau’s response was that Michael Faraday’s name ‘I am fully persuaded will be well known in a few years hence’.30
As a result of Riebau’s encouragement, and the effect of the thousands of books that passed through, or near, his hands, Faraday began in 1809 a collection of ‘Notices, Occurrences, Events Etc relating to the Arts and Sciences’ which he had picked up from newspapers, reviews, magazines and so on. To this collection he gave the title, with its ring of a published collection, ‘The Philosophical Miscellany’ (its contents are listed in Appendix One). He wrote his material out neatly, illustrated it with careful pen-and-ink drawings, and indexed the whole thing. It is an omnivorous and enthusiastic gathering, a clue to the future.
In 1810, when Faraday was nineteen years old, Riebau encouraged him to go to lectures given by the teacher, philosopher and silversmith John Tatum in his house in Salisbury Court, 53 Dorset Street. Faraday’s elder brother Robert found the shilling entry fee for him.31 Tatum’s house was off the eastern end of Fleet Street, a short walk down the hill from the Sandemanian chapel, and thus on one of the Faraday family’s well-trodden routes. The lectures took place on Monday evenings in an upper room where diagrams hung on the walls, and a pair of windows stood opposite Tatum’s desk. We know this because Faraday made a detailed perspective drawing of the empty lecture room, taking it as far as the loops of string suspending the diagrams. There he made friends with other young men and women who were transfixed by the new experimental science. Some, such as Benjamin Abbott and Edward Magrath – both Quakers – and Richard Phillips, became friends for life.
Tatum’s lectures, from which Faraday took notes which he later transcribed and illustrated in detail, covered electricity, galvanism, optics, geology, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy and many other topics, the whole gamut of science, or ‘natural philosophy’. Tatum taught most of what was then known: the gap between basic and advanced scientific research was wafer-thin, and heated disagreements between savants fractured this narrow space. Tatum gave due acknowledgement to his fellow natural philosophers, as scientists were then known, including Professor Humphry Davy, Director of the Laboratory at the Royal Institution, who had demonstrated how water could be decomposed by an electrical current, and Luigi Galvani, who showed how frogs’ legs could be convulsed by an electrical charge. He would demonstrate phenomena with twenty or thirty experiments each evening, all of which Faraday described meticulously in his notes. Some of the experiments went wrong – one evening an electrical charge was too much for a frog, which flew out of its jar and hopped about the room. Other experiments surprised and shocked members of the audience: ‘If any Lady or Gentleman wishes to feel the sensation of the galvanic fluid I should be very happy to accommodate them. They must wet their hand in water and hold one ball in each … hah hah hah hah ha …’.32
After the shrieks had subsided, Tatum made some more spectacular experiments – by passing an electrical spark through a specially perforated and twisted worm of silver foil he spelt out the word SCIENCE for all to see as the finale to a lecture on Electricity.33
The lectures were often oversubscribed, with the result that Tatum had to repeat the more popular ones. One of these was ‘Optics, theory and practice’, in which he demonstrated the camera obscura and camera lucida, and showed glass transparencies of landscape and other scenes with a ‘magic lantern’. Tatum’s teaching was essentially visual and demonstrative – he did not only tell his pupils, he showed them. Perhaps using waxed, and thereby transparent, engravings after Joseph Wright of Derby and others, he projected ‘an operation on the air pump … a chemist with a pneumatic trough … a view in a mine in Derbyshire … a gentleman’s mansion’.34 The scientific education that Tatum gave was complete and fascinating, with an emphasis on what would now be called physics; rather less on chemistry. As an offshoot of the lecture series, he invited a group of the men in his audience to meet at his house every Wednesday evening to listen to and give lectures of their own.35 This became formalised in 1808 as the City Philosophical Society, whose members heard Tatum speak and who took it in turns, every other Wednesday, to lecture to the group on scientific subjects that they had studied.36
Some years after he had transcribed them, Faraday collected his notes of Tatum’s lectures together and bound them in four volumes with a fond, gracious and revealing dedication to Riebau.37 ‘Sir,’