Oxford University Press's admirable Very Short Introduction series currently has something in the region of two hundred titles. Of those, about forty or so are devoted to famous intellectual figures. Of those great thinkers, five might be described as men (no women, of course) of science. Michael Faraday's addition to the list is quite a coup, therefore. He has been elevated to a highly select pantheon that, at the time of writing this review at any rate, does not yet even include Einstein. The choice is in some respects an odd one. Faraday nowadays tends to get thought the great experimenter rather than a theorist – a hands-on rather than an ideas man. That, however, is quite certainly not how he would have described himself, nor is it a distinction that many of his contemporaries would have drawn. As far as Faraday was concerned, thinking and doing were intimately intertwined.

As James emphasizes, this is not a conventional biography. It would certainly be a tall order to produce a fully contextualized account of Faraday's life and career, and of his place in the world of Victorian natural philosophy, in this short a space. Instead, James focuses on particular aspects of Faraday, producing a series of pen portraits of his life in science. The chapters are largely chronological in order, but James makes good use of the various stages of Faraday's career to highlight particular aspects of his science. James devotes a significant portion of his chapter on ‘Science and practice’, for example, to a discussion of Faraday's work on lighthouses for Trinity House. Uncontroversially, he devotes chapters to Faraday's work on electricity (and the interconvertibility of forces more generally) and on magnetism (and the origins of field theory). More novel, maybe, for the volume's primary audience, are the chapters on Faraday as a celebrity and on Faraday's twentieth-century reputation.

During Faraday's own lifetime, of course, that reputation rested, to a large extent, on the name he had established for himself as a public scientific performer and purveyor of the latest scientific knowledge to the upper classes. James's edition of Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle demonstrates Faraday's painstakingly acquired mastery of those arts. Faraday spent considerable effort thoughout his career as an active man of science thinking about the art of communication – in part, at least, because it was his job to do so. His Chemical History offers an interesting example of some of the strategies for performing and disseminating natural knowledge of Victorian men of science. James has edited with a light hand. A brief introduction places the Chemical History in its historical context and discusses various aspects of the history of the Christmas lectures (of which the six lectures on which the published book was based were originally part) and of the book's original reception. The main text is then based on the original 1861 edition. Also included is a facsimile of Faraday's original notes for the lectures as held at the Royal Institution.

Both these little books should make useful additions to any historian of science's shelves. More importantly, they offer opportunities to reach a wider audience as well. That is the whole point of the Very Short Introduction series, of course, but I can imagine the Chemical History being useful to cultural and literary historians more generally too. Particularly in company with James's fine introductory essay it provides an excellent point of entry into the literary dimension of Victorian science.