Lincolns Inn <1>
22d Aug 1857
My dear Sir
I send You copies <2> of the 2 specifications of Dallas <3> & P. Pretsch <4> –
I don’t think Mr Loxley <5> means to send us a copy of Mr Hindmarsh’s opinion <6> –
If we take no steps in Michaelmas Term, the Defts may then compel us to proceed or to relinquish. – and then we should have to pay their taxed costs <7> – Dallas’s have been taxed at £16. 7. which we have paid but the other’s costs will be heavier – there would be no object, as they have acted together & the admission extends to all of them, to sever at this stage –
But rather than abandon the action it would be preferable to accept a royalty from them however small and let each Party pay his own costs – the license would only last so long as they paid for it.
According to Pretsch the business is only now carried on upon a very reduced scale & this coupled with the application to You to take Mr Fenton’s <8> place looks very much like an exhausting of the capital – upon the whole it seems unwise to pursue the litigation with people who are so floundering about and since to join them is impossible, there would be no loss of dignity in withdrawing from it on the terms offered if we can procure no better: and if contrary to our expectation they should recover their losses & turn the Invention to account, there will remain the satisfaction of having brought the new art into active practice by these means –
believe me to remain My dear Sir Ever Your’s faithfully
J. H Bolton
Wm Hy Fox Talbot Esq
Notes:
1. One of the four Inns of Court, the ‘colleges’ of barristers at the English Bar. Bolton had his chambers [lawyer’s offices and, at the time, living-quarters also] there.
2. Not traced.
3. See Doc. No: 07399.
4. The Patent Photo-Galvanographic Company (commonly, The Photogalvanographic Company) was based on the work of Paul Pretsch (1808–1873), Austrian photographer & inventor and former Manager of the Imperial Printing Establishment in Vienna. Located in Holloway Road, Islington, London, from 1856-1857, Pretsch took over as manager and Roger Fenton (1819–1869), photographer & lawyer, was a partner and their chief photographer. Starting in late 1856, they published a serial portfolio, Photographic Art Treasures, or Nature and Art Illustrated by Art and Nature, illustratated with photogalvanographs derived from several photographer's works. Photogalvanography was uncomfortably closely based on elements of WHFT’s patented 1852 Photographic Engraving but, unlike Talbot, the plates were heavily retouched by hand. Compounding the legal objections of Talbot, their former manager, Duncan Campbell Dallas, set up a competing company to produce the Dallastype. The company collapsed and near the end of 1860 Pretsch, out of money, allowed his patent to lapse. A public appeal was launched in 1861 to assist him but he returned to Vienna in 1863 in ill health, going back to the Imperial Printing Establishment, but finally succumbing to cholera.
5. Of Fry and Loxley, solicitors for the Patent Photogalvanographic Company with whom Talbot was in dispute regarding his patent for photographic engraving. See Doc. No: 07807. The other partner, Peter Wickens Fry, had been a prominent opponent of Talbot’s photographic patents.
6. Despite repeated requests, Fry and Loxley were refusing to hand over the barrister’s opinion [see Doc. No: 07431].
7. The legal costs as calculated by the courts.
8. Roger Fenton (1819–1869), photographer & lawyer. For this suggestion, see Doc. No: 07437.