Melbury <1>Dorchester
28 Octr /56
My dear Henry
Your uncle Harry wants to know if the title page to the Photographic Book of the Crystal Palace is ready as he is going to bind the copy you gave him with your letter in the first leaf<2>
I enclose you seed of a pretty papaveraceous plant Emily <3> sent from America it seems quite hardy.
Your Sax. ciliata is my Nepalensis, my ciliata makes a very pretty pot plant in winter tho’ it is quite tardy
What a fearful earthquake there seems to have been in Egypt – I hope the Pyramids have stood the shock.
We have a rhododendron in flower already here – the early pink with rusty leaf a hybrid of Caucasicum – In the stove is Ipomśa bona nox a very laudable plant – & Chirita Moonii why not lunaris or lunatica <4>
I gathered some seeds of your Irish Yew & they have stuck the paper together so well I am sure they would make a useful gum.
Some of Emily’s Silurian <5> fossils from America are of the greatest beauty & delicate preservation – we have been looking at some thro’ a fine microscope & also at some minute shells taken out of Guano.
Yr
W F S
Notes:
1. Melbury, Dorset: one of the Fox Strangways family homes; WHFT was born there.
2. Henry Stephen Fox Strangways, 3rd Earl of Ilchester (1787–1858). This was for The Executive Committee of the Great Exhibition of 1851's publication of the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Reports by the Juries. Four volumes, illustrated by original photographic prints from negatives by Hugh Owen and Claude Marie Ferrier. In the copies given to WHFT, a dedicatory sheet was inserted (most likely printed up by him): 'This Work, on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Illustrated with Photographic Plates, being One of Fifteen Copies Given by the Royal Commissioners to H.F. Talbot, Esq. of Lacock Abbey, as The Inventor of this Branch of the Photographic Art, was by him presented to _____'. This publication caused WHFT considerable consternation at the time, for he felt that the Commissioners had stealthily and unfairly taken the job of printing the plates away from Nicolaas Henneman. For a summary of this complex situation, see Nancy B Keeler, 'Illustrating the "Reports by the Juries" of the Great Exhibition of 1851; Talbot, Henneman, and Their Failed Commission,' History of Photography, v. 6 no. 3, July 1982, pp. 257-272.
3. Amelia ‘Emily’ Matilda Murray (1795–1884), author and Maid of Honor to Queen Victoria. Although a strong advocate in the Royal Court for the education of delinquent and abandoned children, she defended the institution of slavery in the American South after her travels there between July 1854 and October 1855. The publication of her memoir on this forced her resignation as Woman of the Bedchamber. Murray, Letters from the United States, Cuba, and Canada (London: J. W. Parker & Son, 1856).
4. [Latin] of the Moon, connected with the Moon. [A pun: the plant name refers to the surname Moon or Mooney].
5. The geological era 440–410 million years ago.
6. Prof John Lindley (1799–1865), botanist.