Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises An Artisan Essay-circle in Regency London

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