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Document number: 05069
Date: 15 Sep 1844
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: FEILDING Elisabeth Theresa, née Fox Strangways
Collection: British Library, London, Manuscripts - Fox Talbot Collection
Collection number historic: Acc no 20176 (envelope only)
Last updated: 6th February 2015

Mount Edgcumbe <1>
15th September

My Dear Henry

Have you seen an advertisement which professes to sell at No 98 Cheapside not only photographic cameras, but iodine boxes, bromine pans, iodized paper & every chemical preparation & apparatus required in Photography, with full instruction given to purchasers, & shortly will be published Plain directions for obtaining Pictures on Paper by the Calotype Process. How can they do all this without a licence from you?<2> Claudet too I see advertises the Talbotype Portraits almost every day in the Times. <3> –

It is very odd one cannot squeeze an Answer out of you, so often as I have written – ! The Subscription progresses, at present it is quite dans la haute Aristocratie <4>

Affly yrs
E F

You cannot be so occupied in the Evenings that you have not a moment to write – I do not like to go on writing when perhaps you are gone abroad – This moment have they given me your Letter <5> which is a great comfort as I did not know what was become of you – Have you ascertained how many Pencils of Nature <6> are left? as it is useless to mention it to anybody or give a Prospectus if they are all gone

[envelope:]
H. Fox Talbot Esr
31. Sackville Street
London


Notes:

1. Mt Edgecumbe, near Plymouth: seat of the Earl of Mt Edgcumbe.

2. This was Thomas Willats, an optician who trained under Edward Palmer of Newgate Street. He soon published John H Croucher, Plain directions for obtaining photographic pictures by the calotype, energiatype, and other processes on paper : including the chrysotype, cyanotype, chromotype, etc. etc. with all the latest improvements (London: T & R Willats, 1845). Talbot successfully challenged this open infringement of his patent: see Doc. No: 05076 and Doc. No: 05439.

3. The Times (London). Claudet offered both processes at his Adelaide Gallery, advertising "for while by the Daguerreotype likenesses can be taken on a plate of silver with the rapidity of light and with the most beautiful effect, in the Talbotype after one sitting persons may be furnished with any number of copies on paper without further trouble."

4. In the high aristocracy.

5. See Doc. No: 05068.

8. WHFT, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, June 1844–April 1846), [issued in six fascicles].