Faraday al Fresco
Michael Faraday’s tour of Europe included a ‘picturesque’ multicultural event on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
1813
King George III 1760-1820
By 1Chiki1, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Mount Vesuvius viewed across the Gulf of Naples, Italy. Faraday took a professional interest in volcanic activity, as a keen student of gases, and subsequently the discoverer of several new ones, including chlorine and benzene; he also helped prove that gases are in fact the vapours of liquids that have a very low boiling point. While in Italy, he sampled mysterious gases escaping from fissures near Florence, at Pietramala in the Apennines, which together with Davy (having borrowed the laboratory of the Florence Academy from the Duke of Florence after dinner) he determined to be methane.
Introduction
In November 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte, smarting from his humiliating Retreat from Moscow, was waging war across Europe. This did not stop Sir Humphry Davy (who called him ‘the Corsican robber’) going to Paris to receive the Napoleon Prize, or young Michael Faraday from going with him, and afterwards they went on to the Kingdom of Naples, then under French control.
THE months of May and June were spent by the small party mostly in Italy — first in Rome, then Naples, and afterwards travelling from place to place.* At Naples a stay of some days was made, and Faraday’s journal gives us an interesting account of two visits to Mount Vesuvius.
On the second day the party, largely increased by other visitors, had a picnic on the Mount. “Cloths were laid on the smoking lava, and bread, chickens, turkey, cheese, wine and water, and eggs roasted on the mountain, brought forth, and a species of dinner taken at this place. Torches were now lighted, and the whole had a singular appearance; and the surrounding lazzaroni* assisted not a little in adding to the picturesque effect of the scene.* After having eaten and drunk, Old England was toasted, and ‘God save the King’ and ‘Rule, Britannia’ sung;* and two very entertaining Russian songs by a gentleman, a native of that country, the music of which was peculiar and very touching.”
The small party was Sir Humphry, his wife Jane, and Michael. Any Englishman other than the famous Sir Humphry and his entourage would probably have been arrested. They all disapproved of Napoleon, whom Davy contrived to avoid, and were shocked by the parade of looted art in the Paris galleries. But Davy hoped to win France’s scientists from serving Napoleon’s political ends, as he tried to win Britain’s: see Not for Sale. The tour was, however, rather uncomfortable. Jane, who was aristocratic and had taken some winning on Humphry’s part, drew the line at Michael. She refused to let him travel inside the carriage, and regarded him more or less as a manservant, which grated on Faraday considerably though he said little about it, even in his private journal.
A technical term in the 1800s, first popularised by William Gilpin in 1782. The picturesque ideal combined beauty and awe in rustic harmony, so a genteel English picnic on a smouldering volcano surrounded by friendly bandits would be more or less a textbook definition.
The Lazzaroni were lowly, working class street people of Naples, with a reputation for being capable of pretty much anything. At this time, Naples was ruled not by the Lazzaroni’s beloved Ferdinand IV but by Napoleon’s usurping brother-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat. The Lazzaroni would presumably be on their best behaviour with British and Russian tourists for company.
See ‘God Save the King!’ and Rule, Britannia!. ‘God Save the King’ was written in the midst of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and ‘Rule Britannia’ formed part of the Masque ‘Alfred’, composed by Thomas Arne and performed for the Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1740. The two songs were admired by Ludwig van Beethoven, who wrote a set of piano variations for each of them.
