Saturday
My Dear Henry
I hope you perceive by my letter yesterday that Lord Northampton <1> cannot be accused of a want of respect for Science. I met Mr Babbage <2> at Lord Foley’s <3> Ball, & he talked a great deal about you. He said yours was a reputation that would last. He is anxious to impress on you that it is absolutely necessary to have assistance for the mechanical part. He says he pays £400 a year to some person or persons to assist him & was obliged to teach one of them mathematics to enable him to do so. The Baron de Neumann <4> made me promise to ask you for a prin four Photographs for him to send to Metternich,<5> who already possesses some that William <6> gave, but the Baron thinks these much superior. The 4 he wants are a piece of the broad lace, a statue, a leaf from the black letter book, and a view of Laycock Abbey. <7> The leaf of the old book particularly enchanted him, & he could not at first believe it was not itself actually laid under the glass. He wants to know by what title he is to ask for the memoir <8> you published on the subject, and who the publisher is. He wants to buy several to send to Vienna. It seems they take a very great interest in it there. Dr Copplestone <9> Bishop of Landaff has published a volume of letters from Lord Dudley to himself Everybody is reading them in one of them honorable mention is made of you I am told –<10>
[envelope:]
Henry Fox Talbot Esre
Laycock Abbey
Chippenham
Wilts
Notes:
1. Spencer Joshua Aiwyne, 2nd Marquess of Northampton (1790–1851).
2. Prof Charles Babbage (1792–1871), mathematician & inventor.
3. Thomas Henry Foley, 4th Baron Foley (1808–1869).
4. Baron Philipp Freiherr von Neumann(1781-1851), Austrian diplomat.
5. Prince Klemens Wenzel Lothar Metternich-Winneburg (1773–1859), chancellor of Austria 1821–1848. WHFT promptly complied with the request - see Doc. No: 04061.
6. William Thomas Horner Fox Strangways, 4th Earl of Ilchester (1795–1865), botanist, art collector & diplomat.
7. For similar images see Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 46, 62, 88.
8. WHFT, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s pencil. Read before the Royal Society, January 31, 1839 (London: R & J E Taylor, 1839).
9. Bishop Edward Copplestone.
10. John William Ward (d. 1833), later the first Earl of Dudley, wrote on 27 November 1821: “We have a rather remarkable young man here, a Mr. Talbot, a Wiltshire gentleman of independent fortune. He was high in the list … at Cambridge … he is rather unlicked, but that don’t signify. We have fine gentlemen enough. He is very laborious, not so much I think out of vanity or even ambition as from the mere love of what he is acquiring. He has an innate love of knowledge, and rushes towards it as an otter does to a pond. He bids fair to be a distinguished man.” Ward, an eccentric but highly intelligent man, was an MP and a diplomat and he knew Virgil by heart. Letters of The Earl of Dudley to The Bishop of Llandaff (London: John Murray, 1840), pp. 291-298. The original letter is preserved in the Devon Record Office.