Unused to the arts of flattery I can only express my obligations in a plain but sincere way. Permit me therefore Sir to return thanks in this manner for the many favours I have received at your hands and by your means, and believe me your grateful and Obedient Servant, M Faraday.
A close look at the way the pen runs reveals that when Faraday wrote his signature he did the ‘F’ first: thus what he actually wrote was ‘F Maraday’, the manner of his signature, with its mild form of disguise, that he practised all his life.
But long before they were dedicated and bound Riebau had already shown Faraday’s notes to ‘Mr Dance Junr. of Manchester St., who … requested to let him shew them to his Father, I did so, and the next day Mr. Dance very kindly gave [Michael Faraday] an Admission ticket to the Royal Institution Albemarle St.’38
The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, was set up and initially funded by a group of aristocrats, MPs and philanthropists who in 1799 had met to consider urgently ways of speeding the application of newly-evolving scientific principles to the betterment of life for the general population of Britain. The Institution’s mission was put into words by one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford: ‘for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical invention and improvements, and by teaching by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments the application of science to the common purposes of life’.
The ticket Faraday had been given was a pass to attend the remaining lectures in what was to be Humphry Davy’s final series there, on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. The elder ‘Mr Dance’ has been identified as the musician William Dance,39 but there is no evidence to prove this assertion. All the Dances were members of the Royal Institution, and many of them gave 17 Manchester Street as their address in the Institution Managers’ Minutes.40 The Dance who shows the strongest credentials for being the man who first gave Michael Faraday the introduction to the Royal Institution is the architect George Dance the Younger. As we shall see, it was George Dance who had a particular influence on Faraday’s understanding of classical art and architecture, fostered during his years as Riebau’s apprentice, and as a result Faraday held a lasting gratitude for him. George Dance also had, as did many people of fashion, a continuing interest in electricity, which is first recorded by the diarist Joseph Farington in 1799: ‘Hay’s Electrical Lecture I went to. – N & G Dance, – [Benjamin] West &c there …’.41 Twenty years later, when his health was ebbing, George Dance retained a faith in the healing powers of electricity. Farington reports: ‘Dance I called on. He was gone to Partington’s to be electrified. I met Miss Green who gave me a very unfavourable accnt of the state of his spirits.’42
Concurrent with his education as a young bookbinder and natural philosopher ran Faraday’s religious education. This took place at the Sandemanian chapel, led by a succession of Elders whose teaching is marked by key symbols in the margins of Faraday’s Bible.43 Very many of the pages in most of the books of the Bible, the Apocrypha excepted, are marked by Faraday’s pencil, in single, double and heavier lines denoting the relative significance of the passages to him at that time. Thus, there is evidence of detailed study of Leviticus, the book of Jewish laws and ritual, and the exhortation to obedience to God’s law in Deuteronomy 4 is well marked. The biblical foundation of Faraday’s youthful pursuit of knowledge is indicated in his firm markings in Job 28, where, at verses 1–2 he highlights:
Surely there is a vein of silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.
This follows the chapter heading: ‘There is a knowledge of natural things. But wisdom is an excellent gift of God’. At places where his own Christian name is mentioned, for example in Daniel 12.1 – ‘And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’ – Faraday has marked it clearly.
The world that Michael Faraday was introduced to at Riebau’s was wider and more dangerous than the Sandemanian clique. Another of the sophisticated outsiders who seemed to be regulars in the shop was Jean-Jacques Masquerier, who had fled Paris for England in 1792. Masquerier, who like Riebau was of Huguenot descent,44 had been born in Chelsea of French parents, but the family had returned to Paris a year after his birth. The young man had studied drawing in Paris, and having arrived in England entered the Royal Academy Schools aged fourteen in December 1792, and went on to become a fashionable portrait and history painter.
During Napoleon’s rise to power Masquerier returned to Paris where he made some secret studies of the Emperor-to-be which he used and reused in his paintings.45 He gossiped about French revolutionary politics and personalities, particularly to Joseph Farington, and in 1801 exhibited in Piccadilly a huge picture of Napoleon reviewing the consular troops. This made him £1000 profit, but it led to scandal when William Cobbett accused him of being a French spy.46 Among Masquerier’s friends in the circles around the Royal Academy at this time were the painters Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Years later, however, the poet Thomas Campbell described Masquerier in temperate, even condescending, terms as a ‘pleasant little fellow with French vivacity’,47 while the painter John Constable loathed him: ‘although he has made a fortune in the Art, he enjoys it only as a thief enjoys the fruits of his robbery – while he is not found out’.48
Masquerier’s address in the early 1800s, given in correspondence in the Crabbe Robinson Papers,49 was Edwards Street, Manchester Square. Nevertheless Silvanus Thompson, one of Faraday’s early biographers, asserts that Masquerier was at one time Riebau’s lodger, and that among Faraday’s tasks as Riebau’s apprentice was the dusting of the lodgers’ rooms and the blacking of their boots.50 However it was that they met, Masquerier liked Faraday and appreciated his brightness and talent. He lent him books on perspective and, perhaps in response to a request from Faraday and encouragement from Riebau, taught him to draw.51 The young man rapidly mastered perspective, as the drawings in the Tatum notebooks plainly show. Faraday developed a fluid line which expressed complicated structures of apparatus, wooden stands, glass tubes, connecting wires, brass rods with balls on the ends and so on, all delicate, characterful, rarefied and self-possessed instruments at the beginnings of their own evolution, constructed for particular and discrete scientific purposes.
When Riebau showed Dance the illustrated notes that Faraday had made, he was displaying him as one of his own products, a fine young bookbinder, very well trained, who was now reaching the end of his apprenticeship. He would have shown the work of all his older apprentices to influential patrons in this way, because it was to his advantage as an apprentice master that he should find good situations for his lads. George Dance, the architect of crisp, elegant buildings, and a portrait draughtsman of rare talent, was an ideal person to appreciate Faraday’s neat, informed text and illustrations. The clarity and assurance of the illustrations in particular were of such a level that Dance might reasonably have considered their creator to be a potential student of architecture.
Faraday’s early education with Riebau, Cosway, George Dance and Masquerier might have led him towards art or architecture as much as to science – the various scientific and artistic influences on him had by 1810 served to introduce him to the great breadth of contemporary culture as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. His brush with Swedenborgianism gave added coloration, though we may never know its extent or tone. His experiences of Tatum’s lectures, however, and his responses to them, were such that by the time he first set foot inside the Royal Institution to hear Humphry Davy lecture, Michael Faraday was already as well versed in science as any young man or woman of his generation could possibly be. His weaker points, however, were mathematics, which he found impossible to grasp fully, and chemistry. In Tatum’s lectures chemistry