Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 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 the 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
- Reflections 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 & 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 on the Inertia 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 upon 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)
- Index
Thomas Williams, from The Moral Tendencies of Knowledge (1815)
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 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 the 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
- Reflections 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 & 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 on the Inertia 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 upon 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)
- Index
Summary
[Thomas Williams attended and spoke at the City Philosophical Society during the years when Faraday and his friend, Benjamin Abbott, were members, though they were not contemporaries: Williams must have been at least 20 years older than Abbott and Faraday. He was a Dissenting minister and, in the 1790s, a fairly prolific writer on theology, the author of—among others— A Vindication of the Calvinist Doctrines of Human Depravity and a two-part rebuttal of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, titled The Age of Infidelity. In the nineteenth century he diversified into commenting on national politics, writing both on the amelioration of the condition of the poor and the folly of radicalism.
As a fellow member of metropolitan self-improvement societies, Williams gives an interesting comparison with Faraday, particularly in terms of their views on auto-didacticism and artisan self-improvement. Williams’ religious tenets, while Dissenting, differed significantly from Sandemanian beliefs; but it is his class politics more than his Calvinism that drives his argument in this lecture. Firmly on the side of popular education and against conservative reaction, Williams is careful to draw a very sharp distinction between his listeners and the poor whose claim to education is in doubt; he reassures his audience that far from stirring up popular revolt, the spread of knowledge through British society will result in a more peaceful nation: ‘the more enlightened are the lower classes, the less have we to apprehend from popular excesses.’ Thus Williams makes a direct connection between the maintenance of the social order in Britain and the spread of popular education—a far more topical and political comment than the members of the essay-circle were prepared to make.
Abbott noted in a memoir that Williams habitually broke or bent the CPS's ban on religious discussion. But Williams claimed in the preface to this lecture that he had respected the CPS's rules in drafting his talk and that the religious material included in the published version had been omitted from the lecture delivered at Dorset Street; accordingly, I have omitted it from the brief extract reprinted here.]
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- Michael Faraday’s Mental ExercisesAn Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London, pp. 220 - 222Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008