On the 22nd of September, 1791, was born, at Newington Butts, then an outlying Surrey village, but since long surrounded and swallowed up within the area of Greater London, the boy Michael Faraday. He was the third child of his parents, James and Margaret Faraday, who had but recently migrated to London from the little Yorkshire village of Clapham. Clapham lies under the shadow of Ingleborough, on the western border of the county, midway between Settle and Kirkby Lonsdale. The father, James Faraday, was a working blacksmith; the mother, daughter of a farmer of Mallerstang, the romantic valley which runs past Pendragon Castle to Kirkby Stephen. James Faraday was one of the ten children of a Robert Faraday, who in 1756 had married Elizabeth Dean, the owner of a small homestead known as Clapham Wood Hall, since pulled down. All Robert Faraday’s sons appear to have been brought up to trades, one being a shoemaker, another a grocer, another a farmer, another a flax-worker, and another a shopkeeper. Descendants of some of these still live in the district.
After Michael’s birth, his parents moved to the north side of the Thames, living for a short time in Gilbert Street, but removing in 1796 to rooms over a coach-house in Jacob’s Well Mews, Charles Street, Manchester Square, where they lived till 1809. In that year, young Michael being now nearly eighteen years old, they moved to 18, Weymouth Street, Portland Place. Here in the succeeding year James Faraday, who had long been an invalid, died; his widow, who for some years remained on at Weymouth Street, maintaining herself by taking in lodgers until her sons could support themselves and her, survived till 1838. Though a capable woman and a good mother, she was quite uneducated. In her declining years she was wholly supported by her son, of whom she was very proud, and to whom she was devoted.
Michael received very little schooling. One of his nephews tells the following tale of his boyhood. He was at a dame’s school; and, either from some defect in his speech or because he was too young to articulate his r’s properly, he pronounced his elder brother’s name “Wobert.” The harsh schoolmistress, bent on curing the defect by personal chastisement, sent the aforesaid “Wobert” out with a halfpenny to get a cane, that young Michael might be duly flogged. But this refinement of cruelty reacted on itself; for Robert, boiling with indignation, pitched the halfpenny over a wall, and went home to tell his mother, who promptly came down to the scene of action and removed both boys from the school. From the age of five to thirteen Michael lived at Jacob’s Well Mews, spending his out-of-school hours at home or in the streets playing at marbles and other games with the children of the neighbourhood.
