Faraday’s hope, expressed in 1827, that in two years the Royal Institution might be restored to a financially sound position, was not realised. He worked with the most scrupulous economy, noting down every detail of expenditure even in farthings. “We were living on the parings of our own skin,” he once told the managers. In 1832 the financial question became acute. At the end of that year a committee of investigation reported as follows:-- The Committee are certainly of opinion that no reduction can be made in Mr. Faraday’s salary--£100 per annum, house, coals, and candles; and beg to express their regret that the circumstances of the Institution are not such as to justify their proposing such an increase of it as the variety of duties which Mr. Faraday has to perform, and the zeal and ability with which he performs them, appear to merit. [Sidenote: A HUNDRED A YEAR, AND TWO ROOMS.] A hundred a year, the use of two rooms, and coals! Such was the stipend of the man who had just before been made D.C.L. of Oxford, and had received from the Royal Society the highest award it can bestow--the Copley Medal! True, he made £200 by the Woolwich lectures; but he had a wife to maintain, his aged mother was entirely dependent upon him, and there were many calls upon his private exercise of charity. About the year 1835 it was the intention of Sir Robert Peel to confer upon him a pension from the Civil List, but he went out of office before this could be arranged, and Lord Melbourne became Prime Minister. Sir James South had in March written to Lord Ashley, afterwards the well-known Earl of Shaftesbury, asking him to place a little historiette of Faraday in Sir Robert Peel’s hands. The said historiette[14] contained an account of Faraday’s early career and a description of the electrical machine which he had constructed as a lad. “Now that his pecuniary circumstances,” it went on, “were improved, he sent his younger sister to boarding-school, but to enable him to defray the expense, to deprive himself of dinner every other day was absolutely indispensable.” Peel expressed to Ashley lively regret at not having received the historiette earlier when he was still in office. To Ashley, later, he wrote the following hitherto unpublished letter:-- Drayton Manor, May 3, 1835. MY DEAR ASHLEY,--You do me but justice in entertaining the belief that had I remained in office one of my earliest recommendations to his Majesty would have been to grant a pension to Mr. Faraday, on the same principles precisely upon which one was granted to Mr. Airy. If there had been the means, I would have made the offer before I left office.