Introduction

Summary

Faraday and style

In the summer of 1818, Michael Faraday, then approaching his twenty-seventh birthday and employed as Chemical Assistant in the Royal Institution in London, persuaded four male friends to join him in forming a self-help writing group. The MS book of essays and poems that this group produced is held in the archives of the Royal Institution and is printed here for the first time, and in full. It offers a unique corpus of evidence about Michael Faraday's philosophical ideas and literary taste. The texts gathered in this edition rarely address scientific topics directly; but many of them develop ideas which were crucial in underpinning and enabling Faraday's ceaseless advocacy of and engagement in self-improvement, including scientific education. Further, they illuminate Faraday's relationship with the history, culture and manners of his own time. Perhaps even more importantly, these writings give new evidence about the ideas and taste of a social group which is underrepresented in histories of authorship in the early nineteenth century: highly aspirational, successful artisans whose purpose in writing was not the advancement of radical nor conservative politics, but to take their part as citizens in the polite culture of their time.