Faraday to Arthur-Auguste De La Rive   2 October 1858

Hampton Court | 2 October 1858

My dear friend

Your subject¹ interests me deeply every way; for Mrs. Marcet was a good friend to me, as she must have been to many of the human race. I entered the shop of a bookseller and bookbinder at the age of 13, in the year 1804, remained there 8 years, and during the chief part of the time bound books. Now it was in these books, in the hours after work, that I found the beginnings of my philosophy. There were two that especially helped me; the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from which I gained my first notions of Electricity²; and Mrs. Marcets conversations on chemistry³, which gave me my foundation in that science. I believe I had read about phlogiston⁴ &c in the Encyclopaedia, but her book came as the full light in my mind. Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker or was marked as a precocious person;- I was a very lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the Arabian nights⁵ as easily as in the Encyclopaedia. But facts were important to me & saved me. I could trust a fact,- but always cross examined an assertion. So when I questioned Mrs. Marcets book by such little experiments as I could find means to perform, & found it true to the facts as I could understand them, I felt that I had got hold of an anchor in chemical knowledge & clung fast to it. Hence my deep veneration for Mrs. Marcet; first as one who had conferred great personal good & pleasure on me;- and then as one able to convey the truths and principles of those boundless fields of knowledge which concern natural things to the young, untaught, and enquiring mind.

You may imagine my delight when I came to know Mrs Marcet personally;- how often I cast my thoughts backward delighting to connect the past and the present;- how often when sending a paper to her as a thank offering I thought of my first instructress;- and such like thoughts will remain with me⁶[.]

I have some such thoughts even as regards your own father ⁷:- for when, later in life, I was first at the Royal Institution and then abroad with Sir H. Davy, your father was one of the very earliest, I think I may say the first, who personally, at Geneva, and afterwards by correspondance, encouraged and by that sustained me.

Though I have not seen M. A. Prevost⁸ I have had a letter from him & written a reply. I am afraid I shall be very useless for I have no knowledge of the opticians & am without the information he wants. An alien as regards Society, & of very bad memory, I cannot either pick up, or lay up, information of that kind; but thought the Dollonds⁹ might inform him.

My wife desires her kindest remembrances to you & Madame De la Rive. She keeps pretty well but cannot walk many yards. We are now at Hampton Court, in the house which the Queen has given me. We shall use it in the summer months, & go into town in the cold weather & the Season. I believe it will be a comfortable pleasure for the few years that remain of life;- but hope for a better house shortly;- and we may do that without presumption, seeing through whom it is that we obtain right to such a hope[.]

Ever My dear friend | Yours Affectionately | M. Faraday

M. A. de la Rive | &c &c &c