link to Talbot Project home page link to De Montfort University home page link to Glasgow University home page
Project Director: Professor Larry J Schaaf
 

Back to the letter search >

Result number 1 of 6:   < Back     Back to results list   Next >  

Document number: 8892
Date: Sun 06 Nov 1864
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: TALBOT Charles Henry
Collection: British Library, London, Manuscripts - Fox Talbot Collection
Collection number historic: Acc 22955 (envelope)
Last updated: 13th November 2012

Llandaff
Sunday evening Novr 6.

My dear Father.

I am very much obliged to you for having paid my allowance into the Melksham <1> Bank, whence I shall probably soon draw some of it & put in a Bank at Cardiff. No one from Margam was at the Festival (not concert) at Cardiff. I find Dr Ures dictionary of Arts Manufactures & Mines <2> to be a decidedly useful acquisition and I have been reading the process of making aluminium. There is a very full account of the manufacture of Iron which would interest you. I also read an arct article on Lithography – & some others.

Monday.

I should be very much obliged if Ela <3> would try & find me Todhunters Analytical Conic sections, <4> and Todhunters Differential Calculus <5> also Frost’s Newton (which was in the Library or somewhere) which are I believe somewhere at Lacock & would send them to me by Book Post. I am on the scent of some theorems in Geometry and if I was a good hand at analysis I could find out at once whether they are true or false, which it is not easy to do geometrically. I have had a letter from Mrs Nicholl asking me to Merthyr Mawr next Friday and I mean to accept it. We had a sharp frost here this morning –

Your affect son
Charles.

P.S.
Mr Prichard <6> is now going over to Cardiff to see Mr Waldron <7> his lawyer about drawing Champneys & my indentures. Champneys has accepted the terms f 400 £ for 3 300 £ for 4 years with the option of changing it at the end of 3 years for the shorter period and paying the additional hundred pounds. Mr Prichard suggested that it would be perhaps a good thing for me to make the same reservation in my case – so I told him that you yourself had suggested it as you did when I was at Lacock. I though perhaps he had mentioned it to you but he says he had not. Now Mr Prichard says that judging by my present progress I ought to be quite able to set up for myself at the end of 3 years, so I think that that reservation ought to be made, for if at 3 years I am competent to practise I ought not to lose any time about it, as I am have already started considerably later than is usual. Mr Prichard proposed as you had said so to tell Mr Waldron to put it in, but I said as I was writing I would write and ask you at once. I myself certainly am of opinion that it would be better to make the reservation –

[envelope:]
H Fox Talbot Esq
Lacock Abbey
Chippenham


Notes:

1. Melksham, Wiltshire: market town near Lacock, 2 miles S.

2. Andrew Ure (1778–1857); chemist and scientific writer, Ures dictionary of arts, manufactures, and mines (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 5th edition, 1860), co-edited by Robert Hunt (1807–1887).

3. Ela Theresa Talbot (1835–1893), WHFT’s 1st daughter.

4. Isaac Todhunter (1820–1884), mathematician. A Treatise on Plane Co-Ordinate Geometry as applied to the straight line and the conic sections (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855).

5. Possibly Isaac Todhunter, Treatise on the Differential Calculus and the Elements of the Integral Calculus (1852).

6. John Prichard, Welsh architect; Charles Henry Talbot apprenticed to.

7. Clement Waldron, attorney, Cardiff.

Result number 1 of 6:   < Back     Back to results list   Next >