Marcet,Jane

Marcet, Jane. Conversations on Chemistry. 6th ed. 2 vols. London Longman, 1819. 

Faraday lived his entire life in what is now greater London. The son of a blacksmith, he had no formal education beyond the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Apprenticed to a bookbinder at the age of 13, Faraday educated himself by reading virtually every book that came into the shop. One that particularly impressed him was a textbook, Conversations in Chemistry, written by Mrs. Jane Marcet. 

Fortunately for a poor, would-be chemist like Leblanc, France s aristocratic passion for the physical sciences crossed economic, social, and political borders. Intellectuals such as Rousseau and Diderot cultivated the sciences with enthusiasm and compiled encyclopedias and dictionaries of natural substances. Local academies and institutes in the far-flung provinces sponsored chemical studies. Crowds flocked to hear chemists lecture and to watch their flashy laboratory demonstrations. Even the future revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, experimented with fire, electricity, and light and tried—in vain—to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In America, Benjamin Franklin abandoned his printing and publishing business for physics, and in England his friend Jane Marcet wrote Mrs Marcet s Conversations in Chemistry for women and working-class men. 

Until the last two decades of the 19th century, Jane Marcet s Conversations on Chemistry47 was the key chemistry resource... 

Jane Marcet was renowned for her book Conversations on Chemistry, in which the elements of that Science are familiarly explained and illustrated by experiments. The book was designed for the woman reader to enable her to understand principles of chemistry. See Morse, E. J. (2004). Marcet, J. H. (1769—1858). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, http //www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18029, accessed 15 Nov 2007. 

Knight, D. 1986, Accomplishment or Dogma Chemistry in the Introductory Works of Jane Marcet and Samuel Parkes , Ambix, 33, 94-8. 

Mrs. Jane (Haldimand) Marcet (1769-1858) was bom in England and married a prominent Swiss physician and respected amateur chemist Alexander Marcet. Influenced by Humphry Davy s public lectures she tried some experiments and decided to write a book to explain the science ... 

FIGURE 284. Conversations on Chemistry was actually authored by Mrs. Jane Marcet. It is a beautiful teaching text that uses Socratic dialogue involving a Mrs. B. and two adolescent girls, Caroline and Emily. It inspired the young Michael Faraday s interest in chemistry and appeared in a number of editions over almost 50 years and sold over 160,000 copies. 

We are informed by one of the American editors of this work that his reason for not placing the name of Jane Marcet on the title-page, was because scientific men believed it fictitious ... 

Real Fairy Folks or The Fairy Land of Chemistry (Lucy Rider Meyer, Boston, 1887) was a rather too precious take on Jane Marcet s marvelous Conversations on Chemistry, first published 80 years earlier. Twins (Joseph and Josephine or Joey and Jessie—sentimental descendants of Sol and Luna ) learn chemistry from their uncle Richard James, a chemist also known as The Professor. ... 

He read The Improvement of the Mind, which suggested keeping a notebook of ideas and observations. He began one. He read an article on electricity in Encyclopedia Britannica and confirmed what he could using a small electrostatic generator. He read Jane Marcet s Conversations on Chemistry, intended more particularly [for] the female sex and decided to become a chemist. 

In 1799 Marcet married Jane Hallimand (London 1769-28 June 1858), also of Swiss parentage and later very wealthy. She wrote a very popular Con-versations on Chemistry which first appeared anonymously, her name being given first in the 13 ed. (1837), and there were many American editions, by 1853 more than 160,000 copies were sold there. The book first interested Faraday in chemistry when he was binding a copy in his early days as a bookbinder s apprentice. In it two young ladies carry on conversations and perform experiments with Mrs. B. (Bryan ). Mrs. Marcet also wrote Conversations on Natural Philosophy, 1819, 1824, 1827, 3 1858, 14 ed. 1872 ... 

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