Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises
An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
256 pages
|
6 x 9
In 1818 Michael Faraday and a handful of London artisans formed a self-help group with the aim of teaching themselves how to write like gentleman. For a year and a half, this essay circle met regularly to read and critique one another’s writings and the “Mental Exercises” they produced are a record of life, literary tastes, and the social and political ideas of dissenting artisans in Regency London. This volume is the first to publish the essays and poems produced by Faraday’s circle and it includes not only the complete corpus of the group’s writings, but detailed annotations, extracts from key sources, a full-length biographical, historical, and a literary introduction as well. Valuable not only for Romantic and early-Victorian historians, but for literary scholars and the general reader as well, this collection sheds considerable light on the developing mind of one our greatest scientists.
“Mental Exercises is an important document for historians interested in the lives and education of artisans of the period.”—Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds
Contents
Introduction
Faraday and style
Organizing the essay-circle
Writing the Mental Exercises
Reading in the Mental Exercises
Note on editorial policy
Part One: The 'Mental Exercises'
List of Members and Scribes' Rota
Members' Agreement
On Study
On Honour
On Argument
On Imagination and Judgement
Hope
On General Character
On the Pleasures and Uses of Imagination
On Politeness
Agis
The Charms of Sleep
Friendship & Charity
An Ode to the PASS
Garreteer's Epistle
A Mathematical Love Letter
On seeing a Rose in the Possession of a Lady at the SMHPABNASL
On Courage
Irritus to the Manager
Marriage is Honourable in All
Friendship
On Mind and the Duty of Improving It
A Word for Page 73
On the Early Introduction of Females to Society
Memoranda
On prematurely Forming Opinion of Characters
On the Death of the Princess Charlotte
Affectation
On Conscious Approbation
The Origin of a Critic--A Fable
Reflection on Death
On Avarice
On Tradesmen
On Laws
On the Changes of the mind
On Marriage
On Calumny
Letter to the Secretary
Enigma
On Marriage
Effeminacy & Luxury
A Brother's Letter to Mr. Deeble
Junius and Tullia
A Ramble to Melincourt
On Triflers
139th Psalm
Infancy
At a Village on the Dunchurch Road
Part Two: Contexts
Faraday and Self-Education
Faraday from the Correspondence (1812-16)
Faraday, from Observations on the Means of Obtaining Knowledge (1817)
Faraday, from 'Observations of the Mind' (1818)
Faraday's indexes to eighteenth-century periodicals
Faraday, from 'Observations on Mental Education' (1854)
The Improvement of the Mind
Isaac Watts, from The Improvement of the Mind (1741)
Samuel Johnson, from The Rambler (1751)
Thomas Williams, from The Moral Tendencies of Knowledge (1815)
Isaac Taylor, from Self-Cultivation Recommended: Or, Hints to a Youth Leaving School (1817)
From The Black Dwarf (1819)
Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein (1818)
Henry Brougham, from Practical Observations up on the Education of the People (1825)
The Pleasures of the Imagination
Joseph Addison, from The Spectator (1712)
Mark Akenside, from The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744)
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History: General History
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
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