Anglicans, Dissenters and Sandemanians

Abstract

Michael Faraday’s life spanned almost eight decades. The England into which he was born in 1791 was bracing itself against the horrors perpetrated by the mob in France, while the state of the nation at the time of his death in 1867 was marked by mid-Victorian prosperity and security. Of the many manifest differences between these periods, the rate of change was most marked during Faraday’s fifth decade; the 1830s saw the most concerted challenge to the old order in society and the partial emergence of the new. This age of reform left an indelible mark not only on politics but also on all aspects of British life, science included. In the biography of Faraday the year 1831 is particularly significant, since it marked his most celebrated discovery, that of electromagnetic induction. Of his many other scientific innovations, the other for which he is probably most widely known — the laws of electro-chemical decomposition — dates from just 3 years later. Indeed, while the 1820s witnessed Faraday’s rise as a scientist, he was at the peak of his career in the 1830s, and it was during that decade that he wrote the first seventeen series of his Experimental researches in electricity, spanning more than 2,000 paragraphs and occupying some 660 pages in the final collected edition.